What Aren't CIO's Getting, But CEO's Are?

Sandy Kemsley ranted about the results of a CIO Insight survey last month that had a significantly large number of polled CIOs and senior IT execs claiming that various bread-and-butter Web 2.0 technologies and collaboration apps such as AJAX, Wikis, Social Networking (tagging, etc.), RSS, etc. were of 'no interest" or "not on the radar screen." She briefly highlights a few on her post, and if one looks at the whole thing in aggregate, the no interest/not on the radar numbers are appalling and should give the Web 2.0 pundits some pause about the speed in which organizations are 'racing' to Web 2.0 or Enterprise 2.0 or whatever we want to call it this week. SOA and SaaS fare a bit better percentage-wise...like a third of the polled don't have it in sight. And before anyone wants to take potshots at CIO Insight, this is one industry magazine that does a really nice job presenting reality in IT and their surveys are well done, so I am swayed by their numbers even though, like Sandy, I'm not real happy about the results.

Now, let's contrast these findings with what Ross Mayfield reports and comments on with respect to Business Week's Guide to Enterprise 2.0 that recently published. The guide and Ross' commentary would lead one to believe that the concepts are beginning to be enthusiastically embraced and we're potentially on the throes of a business revolution on the scale of outsourcing and globablization. Other Web/Enterprise 2.0 proponents have been routinely pounding the adoption-today drums as well.

My take? As Sandy argues, there continues to be a lot of scared, control-freak, "dinosaur" CIOs out there given the CIO Insight results. I really have to wonder how 'enlightened' their CEOs are to all of this potential sea change - and emphasis on 'potential' because from where I'm sitting, the 2.0 changes and shifts will definitely happen and reshape the enterprise, but not as fast as some folks would have you believe. It's really odd to me that CEOs  get enlightenment on this (or are portrayed to be by VCs, journalists, and interviewers), while their CIOs appear to be on a one-way train to Luddite-ville.

Anybody ready for CIO 2.0? Because it looks like a few heads need to roll or go to retirement-land before Web/Enterprise 2.0 makes huge splashes in the enterprise anytime in the near future - not isolated incidents, but the huge paradigm shifts that occured with outsourcing and other concepts over the years.

Damn, that chasm is looking mighty wide tonight...

Comments

[Sandy Kemsley]

I suspect that CEOs can be (or have to be) much more outward-facing, or at least aware of the outside world: a big part of their job is marketing and PR, so they tend to be more plugged in to new trends. CIOs, although they should be plugged in to new technologies, are often much too inward-looking so are missing new trends that are about to broadside them. In some cases, CIOs are inward-looking because they're busy putting out fires; in other cases, they don't want to have to learn some new bit of technology that they think might be a fad when this old stuff is working just fine for them. Neither of those is a very good excuse, unfortunately.

[panasianbiz.com]

My reaction was much the same as yours. The numbers are convincing, but the results aren't necessarily what we might have hoped to see. The paradigms are not just shifting; they are rocking like a seismic event!