SaaS and Cloud forging new roles for CIOs
Just read a good article by Phil Wainewright on the title above http://www.ebizq.net/blogs/connectedweb/2009/05/saas_and_cloud_forging_a_new_r.php expressing the positive reaction fo many CIOs who deploy SaaS, ”In most cases, they will find they not only still have jobs, their work will be more rewarding. Instead of spending their time fighting fires and keeping the infrastructure running, they can turn their attention to enhancing the applications and helping end users achieve a better fit to business needs.”
I especially like the quote from a discussion panel at last week’s CIO Symposium at MIT, as reported by blogger Michael Krigsman. Discussing business-IT alignment, panelist Jim Champy, chairman of consulting for Perot Systems, made this observation:
“CIOs should participate in innovation around the company’s business model, which goes beyond contributions just to product, services, and operations. Managing infrastructure is worthless if the business fails.”
This is very true. Many of our NetDocuments CIO customers strongly express this benefit of SaaS. As one CIO of a law firm with 200 people stated: “In the past our group in IT spent most of our time supporting our former DMS and not focusing on the people. The most significant thing about NetDocuments and the change it has done for us in IT is that we now support the people and no longer need to support the product that the people use.”