IT leaders’ roles seen changing dramatically

The convergence and development of mobile, social, big data, and cloud services—just beginning to mature—will require an entirely different set of IT skills and roles, many of which are yet to be invented.

According to Fred Magee, adjunct research advisor with IDC’s Research Network, "We believe there are clear indicators that the existing role of technology management will evolve in a few short years to a set of roles that includes management of innovation, information intelligence, customer experience, and digital business presence. It's going to be an exciting decade."

As part of its year-end IT Predictions, IDC issued these top ten predictions for how the CIO function will change:

•    In two years, over 70% of CIOs will change their primary role from directly managing IT to become an innovation partner.

•    Before 2017, only 40% of CIOs will rise to produce business-enhancing insights from big data and analytics.

•    70% of CIOs will increase enterprise exposure to risk to accelerate business agility through increased cloud adoption.

•    Enterprise business mobility will require 60% of CIOs by 2017 to support an agile architecture with next-generation mobile applications.

•    The demographic shift to young and mobile customers will require 80% of CIOs in consumer-facing businesses to integrate IT with public social networks by 2015.

•    By 2015, 3rd Platform requirements will drive 60% of CIOs to use enterprise architecture as a required IT tool, but only 40% will deploy EA effectively.

•    By 2015, 60% of CIO security budgets for increasingly vulnerable legacy systems will be 30-40% too small to fund enterprise threat assessments.

•    By 2017, the transfer of mobile, social, big data, and cloud services investments from IT to line-of-business budgets will require 60% of CIOs to focus the IT budget on business innovation and value.

•    By 2016, 80% of the IT budget will be based on providing broad portfolio of IT and business services.

•    By 2018, adoption of 3rd Platform IT technologies will redefine 90% of IT roles.