CIOs need to adapt to the new world

In this item "Most CIO dinosaurs heading for career ice age" the author correctly identifies the need "what's needed is distributed decision-making, rapid response, the use of ad hoc teams, and leadership through collaboration rather than authority."

A question that follows from this is what decision support systems are required to enable this behaviour - certainly not the Excel/Visio/Powerpoint/Email mix that is used by most of the IT organisations to manage the knowledge needed to make decisions.

Nor the specialised tools/languages/systems oriented a various silos e.g. CASE tools and modellers (assured to alienate most non-developers), BP modellers (that operate discretely), CMDBs (with their detailed inventories of current state) or to confuse the issues by putting all ones hopes in yet another paradigm e.g. SOA (having witnesses that past paradigm's function, 4GL, client/server, data, object, etc. haven't solved the problem).

So what is required is a mechanism that allows knowledge to accrete, for all to participate in the gathering an use of information.

This requires some CIO leadership as it requires:recognition that some changes are required i.e.
- current silos of data (and worse still documents) don't work
- a small/minor behavioural change is required by many people i.e. where the record information
- a systems solution is required to enable the behavioural change and integrate the data held in silos.

Many CIO abnegate the need for any significant change and hope that existing strategy and architecture functions (themselves suffering from being yet another silo) can solve the problems within their ambit.