The CIO’s Changing Role: Back Office Operations to Customer Facing Innovation

If you are a CIO and spend most of your time thinking about ERP programmes, data centres, networks and driving down operating costs your world may be about to change. 

Software as a service is not a new idea but now it is reaching maturity. So rather than just providing best of breed applications, it will soon be the default for provision of core ERP systems even in the world’s largest companies.

This will have two impacts for CIOs:

1. It will materially reduce cost and move costs from being fixed CAPEX to variable OPEX

2. It will significantly reduce the effort and complexity of both traditional IT projects (no customisation – it’s not an option, just more powerful configuration) and systems support (no infrastructure to support, no applications upgrades to manage)

As time and money is freed up, where will it go?