Crisis? Hurray, Crisis!

Think about it: many spiritual, self-help, motivational gurus first have been through a period of devastating crisis before becoming the source of all energy and light. Whether you are Louise Hay, Tony Robbins, Byron Katie, Eckhart Tolle, Rhonda Byrne, or (forgive me) even Buddha, apparently you have to face your deepest moments of agony and depression first and only then you may break on through to the other side.

No renewal without a proper catharsis first. I guess we may have found an interesting lesson for many CIO’s too. Our Business & Information Strategy unit is currently finalizing its annual worldwide CIO survey. The main focus is on innovation and although I haven’t seen any results yet (more about it on this blog soon), we can safely assume that more and more CIO’s will need to innovate in 2008. Clearly, business leaders expect solid growth from a new wave of emerging technologies, inspired by many opportunities in the world of web 2.0, networked co-creation and extreme collaboration. And they will turn to the CIO, who may or may not have a pile of good, innovative ideas.

Here’s another prediction for a CIO survey 2008 insight: also more than ever, IT executives will feel impeded in their ability to innovate, constrained as they are by a myriad of heterogeneous, overlapping systems that are difficult to integrate, manage and access in a secure way. These systems typically contain legacy, bespoke applications but there may also be highly customised, multiple instances of ERP packages, 4GL solutions from the roaring nineties and ad-hoc, hacked web solutions from the past few years.

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