CIO's old role in agile crosshairs

CIOs are getting death threats from the agile business camp. How else should they interpret the title of a new book Iterate Or Die?

Indeed, authors Eric Berridge and Michael Kirven are suggesting CIOs should be replaced by what they call chief process officers, CPOs. They argue that process management is closer to the business than information management. And, while a  business process involves automation technology, it is so much more than IT, you need more than a geek in a suit to manage it. Hence, CIOs, if they continue to exist at all, will report to a CPO.

The traditional way CIOs structure their organization is also under fire from the agile crowd; this time the agile development side. At RailsConf this week EngineYard previewed its Flex service that targets enterprises that want to deploy large-scale Ruby-on-Rails applications on EC2.

According to Michael Mullany, vice president of marketing for the San Francisco-based Engine Yard, Flex lets development teams "push" their own applications to production environments "without operations involvement."

"The idea of an agile development team waiting for the operations team to set up infrastructure does not make sense," he says.

Some CIOs might welcome that attitude and ability, especially with an already overworked operations staff. Others might not. At least not before major revisions to change management policies were hashed out.

No matter what, it's going to take a pretty agile CIO to stay atop the relentless agile attacks on his old job.