Saw this on the WSJ stream via Techmeme: yet another refrain about the End of CIO’s as you know it, this time from Rebecca Wettemann, an analyst at Nucleus Research:

There was a time when IT departments could get away with forcing employees to use complicated and hard-to-use software. The average worker didn’t know that better alternatives were out there. But as workers gain experience with consumer-focused software – either in their personal lives or at the office – they’re starting to realize that software can be easy to use and quick to get started on. It started with productivity boosters like instant messaging and collaboration software, but it’s crept into the realm of software that’s traditionally the realm of IT departments, such as sales automation.

“No CIO is going to tell me that [a software project] is going to take 12 to 18 months,” Wettemann tells us. Workers will just find an alternative on their own.

Thats cool - one hopes that the workers will also find ways to integrate it with all the other systems in the enterprise, and maintain and fix it on their own too, and take responsibility for the updates and all the re-jigging required when another system updates itself. (And will decommission it in 6 months time when the next New Shiny Thing comes along )

I didn’t think so…….

This sort of reporting makes this interesting assumption that “user delight” rather than “does it work” is the key determinant of a CIO’s continued employment,. What people like Ms Wetteman don’t get (one suspects because they have little experience of actually running any big IT operation) is its not the User Presentation Layer that is hard to do - which is why N thousand Web 2.0 startups running on shoestrings are blooming. The hard thing is integrating the many complex components at the infrastructure level. A CIO is not fired if the users think an interface is clunky - a CIO is fired if the critical systems don’t work.

But, CIO dinosaurs clearly needs to get their priorities right:

An IT pro’s “job is to pay attention to what is going on out there with the humans in your organization, not the servers”, and…

Managing tech equipment and maintaining older systems will become decreasingly important. Identifying the best new tools early on and figuring out how to get them into the hands of the people they’ll benefit will be the more important skill.

Actually, that is exactly a CIO’s role - with the underlying proviso that it all has to work. One is tempted to see what decisions Ms Wetteman and her ilk would make re rate of adoption of shiny new things if they were actually put in charge of running a company’s IT, and their jobs - and reputation - depended on it.

(Afterthought - that is not to say that better user interfaces are not a good idea, just that they are not a first order priority - consumers, on the other hand, are initially far more “sold” on system UI rather than capability, hence the huge emphasis on that area in consumer systems. There is no doubt that the newer “stuff that works” will be brought into the enterprise, but it will be on a more careful, more selective basis.)