CIOs Rise Again on the Coattails of Cloud Computing, SaaS

Grazed from eWeek.  Author: Eric Lundquist.

When the chief marketing officer, the human resources manager, the vice president of sales and the chief finance officer all tore off chunks of the technology budget, the obituaries for the Chief Information officer position were many and morbid.  A corporate executive without budget is soon a corporate executive without a job went the thinking. And for a while as organizations including Gartner proclaimed that the marketing department would soon wield a bigger tech budget than the CIO, the predictions of the demise of the CIO’s role appeared prescient.

But, stealing a title from Joseph Heller’s great novel about corporate life, “Something Happened” along the way. CIOs and those with different titles, but in the top technology position have the opportunity to retrieve their status due to the very thing which was supposed to relegate them to irrelevance. Software as a Service and the greater cloud computing universe in general is the driver in the CIO rebirth…


The arrival of SaaS (and its siblings—platform as a service and infrastructure as a service) marked a far greater change in corporate computing than simply moving applications from on premise to off premise systems. The issues surrounding security, application integration and how to evaluate, license and develop software also underwent a less heralded, but in many ways more profound, change…

Read more from the source @ http://www.eweek.com/it-management/cios-rise-again-on-the-coattails-of-cloud-computing-saas/