It seems that among the CIO community a Berlin wall is created between those who are determined to move their enterprise applications to SaaS-based constructs versus the group who still believes that on-premise applications are still the best way forward. I think that this is not a simple black and white choice but one that depends on a combination of factors. These are the ones I would consider.

In a world where budget constraints are the talk of the day, also IT-projects at public organizations get more attention. The disaster stories on project failures and budget black holes around often very large and countrywide development projects are known for some years now. As a result the Dutch government decided to introduce a mandatory CIO-role in public organizations. Although the idea is logical, in practice it opens up another can of worms.

My attention was drawn to the outcome of a research performed by Forrester in which it was concluded that CIO's are using to many BI solutions, making them taking decisions on too many and too different analysis outcomes. The result of the research didn't surprise me at all. What did was the statement that CIO's think the reason is the difficulty of integrating the various BI solutions. I think this is turning the world upside down.

After my generic comments on KPI's for ICT in my last blog, it is now time to zoom in on the indicators which should guide the performance of the Corporate Innovation/Information Officer (CIO). For that we need to categorize the various roles we advocated the CIO can and should play.