Good-bye CIO

You ever watch a boxing match - or MMA bout if you're into that - and you see a guy who's clearly had it, he's done, not gonna win, but he's sticking it out?  Too tough to put down, too stupid to quit?  Everybody in the arena knows he's going to lose, it's just a question of whether he goes the distance or gets KTFO?*
  That's today's CIO.
   The Chief Information Officer - or Head MonkeySpanker -  didn't exist thirty years ago, and I predict that job title will be encased in amber five years from now along with other Jurassic job titles like Copy Boy and Buggy Whip Maker.  Lemme 'splain...
   Anyone who works in corporate IT knows that every IT organization is exactly the same.  Dysfunctional.  The difference between companies is just varying degrees of broken.  The problem is that companies try to run something that's pure overhead - Information Technology - like it's a revenue center.  And running IT as if it were making money for the company leads to all sorts of idiocy, like IT and the CIO having their own internal goals and metrics that have nothing at all to do with the goals of the company.
   When you have a sales staff they know their job.  They have goals.  Sell stuff the company makes.  When you have a legal staff they have goals.  Protect the company from lawsuits because of bad decisions the executives make.  When you have an R&D staff they have goals.  Make the next generation of bad products the sales staff can sell and the legal staff can litigate. 
   In contrast, the IT staff's goals are usually far less concrete.  One might even say jell-o like.  Or completely made-up and divorced from reality.  Maintain uptime.  Reduce TCO.  Improve TTD.  Make up more monkey-spank justifications to employ people like project managers who would otherwise starve in the street.**  Almost never do you see an IT staff's goals read 'provide measurable support to the lines of business.'  Because that's a goal most IT groups don't know how to measure and couldn't meet even if they could measure it.
  So the CIO's day consists essentially of:
   1)  protecting his phony-baloney job
   and
   2)  keeping the servers running
   I know they spend most of their time on 1), but it's really 2) that is the main justification for their position.  Companies spend a very large portion of their income in IT support, wires and servers and software and people, and that's what a CIO tells his kids he does when they ask him about his job.  Which he hopes they never do.
   Here's the problem:  many American companies now can outsource everything the CIO claims responsibility for.  Rackspace does this, IBM does this, Microsoft does this, they're all hosting providers.  A hosting provider will do EVERYTHING computer-related.  They will buy the servers, they will install the software, they will maintain security, they will keep up with updates, they will provide backups, and they will provide solid metrics about their performance.  Even better, they will do all this for less than it costs any company right now to do the same thing in-house.
   In a grand irony, the CIO's job is being outsourced.  And, unlike most outsourcing, this time the company you hire to do the job really will do it better than the guy doing it right now.  Better, faster, cheaper.  The CIO is being crushed under the great Karmic wheel, and I think it's poetic justice.
   If I worked for a company and my title included the letters CIO, I'd be desperately maneuvering my way up or out.  Finding a different position in the company or getting a phony PhD from an online diploma mill and doing my best to do anything else to make a living, because I know my time in the corner office is coming to an end.
   CIOs you have been warned.  Ignore me at your peril.


* Knocked The Fuck Out - from 'Friday,' Ice Cube's earliest and best film role
** and who, in a just universe, would become food for coyotes.  I'm not fond of IT project managers.