Partnering With the CIO: The Future of IT Sales Seen Through the Eyes of Key Decision Makers

Yesterday, Today, and Beyond

Before we can talk about partnering with the CIO, we first need to understand how the role of the CIO developed. Second, we need to get a clear fix on where the CIO stands today. Third, we need to plot a likely trajectory for the next generation of CIOs—because they are the IT customers of the future!

Those of us who came of age during the era of FORTRAN and COBOL know in our bones how much the IT universe has changed over the past 35 years. If you’re old enough to remember writing programs on punch cards, you will also remember that in the 1970s and 1980s, most organizations didn’t spend a lot of time or energy thinking about IT.

They weren’t even calling it IT back then; they called it IS, the acronym for information services. At most companies, IS budgets represented mere fractions of annual spending—certainly not enough to warrant close attention from senior executives or directors.

The IS manager was a creature of this semiopaque, laissez faire environment. He (or, rarely, she) was not considered a player in any corporate sense. The IS manager was a technical person whose primary job was making sure the company’s mainframe computers got fixed when they broke down. Gradually, as terminals began appearing on desks, the IS manager’s job expanded to include making sure the terminals got fixed when they broke down.

The adoption of client–server systems in the 1980s made life more interesting for the IS manager but didn’t do much to raise his or her ...