Rick Roy, senior vice president and CIO of CUNA Mutual Group, thinks that retitling 'Chief Information Officer', with 'Chief Integration Officer' is not far off base. He has a list of reasons why.
Watch the video or read the transcript below.
"I think in the future CIOs have to really be that Enterpriser as we were talking about earlier. They have to be very current on what's possible which means they have to be very externally focused, not only with their customers but with the tech industry in a broader sense to understand what is coming.
I think they have to think integration. I think increasingly, the days for most of us of significant in-house development or significant in-house IT operations are absolutely going away. We are seeing that with cloud in the infrastructure side of the world, I think we are on the front of that curve, so I think we will see huge changes in the next five years there.
I was reading something the other day where someone was suggesting CIO is going to stand for Chief Integration Officer, and that resonated with me. I think there is definitely an element of that in this future model of IT where the days of most of us having our own data centers in-house are probably gone. The days of us having big application development teams, doing a lot of in-house new development will change. It might not be completely gone, but the nature of that development will change. It will be smaller projects, taking advantage of things like mobile technologies but also then doing the integration work around maybe multiple SaaS providers in the vendor marketplace.
And I even think on the data center side, I think taking our whole data center to the cloud is a bit problematic today, but that will change. There will be solutions tailored for regulated industries where the security and privacy is hardened using the technologies available.
Read, "IT needs to educate stakeholders about what is possible."
Rick Roy is the former Senior Vice President of Shared Services and Chief Information Officer for CUNA Mutual Group; a $16 billion diversified financial services company, headquartered in Madison, Wisconsin. He is responsible for corporate shared services including information technology, project management office, security, real estate and facilities, and vendor sourcing and procurement. His organization has been honored by CIO 100, InformationWeek 500, and Insurance Networking News for innovative business technology.
