Rick Roy, senior vice president and CIO of CUNA Mutual Group, gives his thoughts on the future role of the CIO.
Watch this 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 time 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's 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're seeing that with cloud in the infrastructure side in the world. I think we're on the front end 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 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, 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 the security and privacy is hardened using the technologies available."
Read Rick Roy's article, '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.
