Welcome to the Era of InfoChaos – How Will Your Organization Adjust?

The game has changed. Information is the world’s new currency. Read just about any business publication, and you will quickly conclude that how an organization manages its information assets is now just as fundamental a source of competitive differentiation as to how it manages its physical assets, its human assets, and its financial assets.

Everything and every process is being re-imagined. According to Gartner senior vice president Peter Sondergaard: “Every budget is an IT budget. Every company is an IT company. Every business leader is becoming a digital leader. Every person is becoming a technology company. We are entering the era of the Digital Industrial Economy."

You probably were expecting a “but,” and, yes, there is a “but.”

Amidst all of this opportunity, organizations are drowning in a sea of content and information. File servers are overflowing and multiplying, making it difficult for anyone to find anything. Information is leaking out of the organization at every turn. If information silos in our existing solutions weren’t bad enough, we now have our content popping up in new silos in SaaS applications that are beyond the reach of our conventional information governance frameworks. Content and information is coming at us at breakneck speed in an ever-changing array of formats and as they would say in the Wizard of Oz, on PCs and laptops and tablets and phones, oh my. Organizations are struggling with the cost of legacy Systems of Record and fearful of the loss of control that’s represented by new Systems of Engagement.

Information Chaos reigns supreme.

In the face of this massive change, CIOs are increasingly under siege. There clearly is no more vulnerable place to be than CIO at a major organization – one newly appointed CIO told me “CIO” ought to stand for “Career Is Over.” Per the Harvard Business Review, The Economist, Corporate Executive Board, Intel, TNS Global, here are some perspectives of CEOs about their CIOs:

• Almost half of CEOs feel IT should be a commodity service purchased as needed.
• Only a quarter of executives feel their CIO is performing above his or her peers.
• Almost half of CEOs rate their CIOs negatively in terms of understanding the business and understanding how to apply IT in new ways to the business.
• 57% of the executives expect their IT function to change significantly over the next three years, and 12% predict a complete overhaul of IT.

On the one hand, in the Digital Industrial Economy, Information is the world’s new currency. On the other, InfoChaos reigns supreme.

Welcome to the new game.