Future CIO role: chief intelligence officer

My colleague Julia King has an interesting interview with Accenture chief scientist Kishore Swaminathan, who envisions a new role for CIOs as chief intelligence officers. "This new breed of IT executive will develop and oversee how companies collect, store, combine, share, analyze and capitalize on their most valuable corporate asset -- huge volumes of data," the article says.

In the interview, he explains:

The CIO used to be the chief infrastructure officer. If not infrastructure officers, they were applications officers. Now they have to take control of data and evolve into the chief intelligence officer.

Basically, the argument that I'm making is that for CIOs to move up the curve, they have to get rid of things they're currently doing so they can focus on bringing the same power IT has in the consumer space to the corporate space. If, for example, a CIO can standardize a mashup development environment and make data from back-end systems easily available, they empower the end user to build the applications they need.

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• Business intelligence: The people issues are the hardest
• New CIO role: Spot disruptive technologies and help develop new products