Today's CIO shall carry a mission to turn the IT organization into a strategic asset that contributes to the enterprise's revenue and hence, profitability. CIOs have the ability to transform information into a competitive weapon that accelerates time-to-market, decreases response time, enables better selling, automates decision making, and improves business forecasting. 

Are CIOs and the IT organizations in an enterprise exist to provide just the IT support? Or should they be there for providing Business Support? Its about time that CIOs should drive their own transformation from taking care of IT Support to moving towards providing Business Support. What do you think? 

Communicating Business Value of IT is a tough job and more so in times when every penny counts and the CIO's organization is accountable for the ROI on IT. Hero MotoCorp, world's largest two-wheeler company has taken the steps in the right direction. They present an Annual IT Report Card to their management which communicates what technology does to keep the business running.  

Who's doing anything about the changing role of the CIO? Is the CIO and/or IT group taking the reigns in hand and driving their future? Or...are we in IT allowing others to plot our course for us? Do we need a CIO focused on operations or do we need a CIO focused on strategic initiatives and how the organization can use technology, information and knowledge to grow and be more competitive? 

At Hero MotoCorp apart from the focus on technology, project management, user delight and processes, there are a lot of other innovative practices, which are being followed by us internally. These practices make us different from IT departments in other organizations. One such practice is an IT Pledge.  

The forecast of current and future CIOs is a multidimensional one that can negotiate assumptions for demand. A clear example of this is when the CIO role meets many of the specialties a corporate board values, yet CIOs are rarely appointed a seat. The CIO Paradox is a book for the everyday CIO - The CIO who is in the trenches dealing with these paradoxes each and everyday. 

A few months ago a CIO twitted: "It's hard to be strategic with your pants on fire." Most CIOs will resonate with this phrase. CIOs are less strategic and more 'fire-fighters'. This is not a generic comment but based on facts and experience. Those CIOs who are moving out of technology manager's role, and taking up strategic position, are preparing for the long-term.  

CIOs cannot avoid change management as they are at the forefront of process and technology. Managing change, that too amidst resistance and organizational politics, has never been an easy task. It required specialized skills to handle. Successful changes were those where the change endeavors has overcome the resistance or have circumvented it.  

Information Technology should work on business strategy besides deploying systems with bare minimum intervention. But unfortunately when we deploy IT systems that are available off-the-shelf, none of them, barring a few, work without intervention on a daily basis from IT staff, which is never away from fire-fighting.  

There are few experts who believe that CIOs will become redundant in the new era of revolution. In my view, they will become more important as IT will enlarge into ICT (information and communication technology) converting its scope of products and infrastructure to pure services, which has to be managed as a demand from business and to be met with supply from outside.