What’s the future like for CIOs?

I recently attended an event where I heard someone say CIOs’ days are numbered. It wasn’t really news to me: That whole concept of CIOs, particularly in government, having a short lifespan dates back to oh, forever.

When CIO first emerged on the scene, people weren’t exactly agog. They used to say CIO meant Career Is Over. For government CIOs, that statements holds some truth.  While former Justice Department CIO Vance Hitch held his position for nearly a decade, making him the longest-serving CIO in government, the average tenure for CIOs is two years.

The nation’s first U.S. CIO, Vivek Kundra, made it 2.5 years before he threw in the towel and handed over the reins to former Microsoft exec Steven VanRoekel. Others who have passed the two-year marker are VA CIO Roger Baker and DHS CIO Richard Spires, who were both appointed in 2009.

But the notion that CIOs would completely vanish is just rubbish, according to an article on CIO.com. CIOs’ roles and responsibilities may change drastically, but they’ll still be around, the story titled "10 Predictions for What the CIO Role Will Look Like in 2020" points out.

In 2012, CIOs will, for example, not have a traditional IT department. With the march to the cloud and rapid advancements in technology, IT departments will move from being a physical entities that manages cloud services to a cloud service itself, the article notes.

Future CIOs will also see a dip in the number of employees they manage. Instead, the future will usher in more autonomous computing that relies less on human intervention for systems to operate correctly.

To read the rest of the story, head over to CIO.com.