Do any REAL CIOs believe we're in a post PC world? No.

Ooops, did I fall for a PR line then?

Sorry, yes. Cloud and Colo are more flexible, etc, but already the Execs were warning of how some of the more predatory vendors were using the way it can be hard to leave as a reason to jack up billing. Vendor lock in is not a new pattern. All that varies over time is the tech used to hold our feet over the fire. What is a new trend is the way flexibility and small incremental pricing means it is easy for even a kind vendor to be asked for lots of little things that end up becoming big bills. Users are only just starting to be educated in this and even then there is resistance to the degree that some will only stop using an unsuitable application if seriously threatened or it is flatly blocked.

The smarter end of IT Execs are thus spotting outbreaks of Shadow IT using services like Box and inviting them in to discuss enterprise licencing. They can usually spin this to the rest of the management team as a cost saving, though it was pointed out that currently the cost is being borne by other parts of the business, it can mean that the cost to the enterprise is lower, but a new cost is added to IT.

So the role of IT leaders is expanding to include more complex negotiations, especially since they are increasingly finding that shadow IT business units have signed up to services without even pretending to read the T&Cs or worry about things like corporate policy on where data may be stored.

This is part of the gravitational force of senior leaders, trying to draw IT centrally, but all the execs outside finance saw fragmentation as inevitable. In the olden days CTOs could say with certainty “we’re an Oracle shop”, but now there are business critical apps that the CTO/CIO might not know about and in some cases know what it even is for.

This is driving big changes in the way tech is bought. In the olden days (2005) the big vendors could easily start the conversation about strategic direction and architectures. However they are increasingly being pushed to the middle as integrators and enablers rather than builders. As we moved to what the IT execs want from future suppliers we can see some good fights brewing.

Integration kept coming up with particular scorn heaped on consumer vendors like Apple who show no sign of caring about getting things to work together because they benefit from their walled gardens. The Execs found themselves torn between the political need to give users shiny toys and having systems that could be integrated. That’s not really a device level issue. Most are trying to draw a new border for IT, where they try not to build dependencies on user hardware at all, except where the dead hand of increasing regulation forces them. It won’t shock you to learn that noisy sales execs are often a driver for iPad/iPhone sales.

One surprise in this was that none of them are seeing major increases in productivity from this change and that Microsoft, long seen as a major source of compatibility and integration headaches is wising up and actively being helpful.

Management of users is also changing. They aren’t controlled any more. Talk is more of enabling than which is having the effect that for many of them IT is more seen as part of the business rather than just a badly behaved cost centre. This is involving a lot of education and culture change. Even in 2015 too many users don’t understand backup and security. Conversely the ratio of IT knowledge between IT execs and the rest of the management team is on average decreasing, with our execs occasionally finding themselves in conversations about apps they’ve never heard of and whose actual purpose is hard to determine.

What we didn’t hear

As I got to the end of my notes of the meeting I realised that the “Big Data” part of the conversation was remarkably short. Basically they said “yes, we’re doing analytics”, BI etc. They didn’t much see that as a step change, just an increment to their workload.

The Ghost of Christmas Future

Most of what the IT execs saw for the next five years wasn’t new tech as we seem to be near a plateau, where changes will be incremental and useful rather than transformative. However the wave of changes with mobile, cloud and big data will fully absorb them. Security got less interest as a future threat, which was a bigger surprise. The execs weren’t complacent, but they weren’t excited or scared either. In their minds they seem to see it settling down to an operation issue that occasionally goes wrong.

So in summary the three megatrends between now and 2020 are

1: Pushing data to the edge rather than hoarding it in the centre/ 2: We’re less in charge of IT than we used to be, but there’s more of it. 3: Integration of ever more systems will bring us both joy and pain.

Our roundtable programme only works if we get readers like you around the table. You can see full details of our June roundtable by clicking here. ®