As a principal for The CIO Group, Bobby Cameron leads Forrester Research for service to the top IT executives in global $1 billion-plus corporations. For more than four years, he has conducted research into developing best practices for IT governance, measuring IT's impact on business and aligning IT with businesses. He writes reports, answers individual CIO's business and technology inquiries and facilitates exchange meetings where CIOs discuss member-selected topics. Much of Cameron's recent work focuses on the restructuring of technology management-including changes to organizations, decision-making processes and sourcing.

Prior to taking on this role, his research focused on technology leadership. He focused on IT services such as ERP, supply chain, and customer management.

Before joining Forrester, Cameron spent five years as director of product management at Dun and Bradstreet Software (DBS). He was responsible for the company's client/server directions, decision support products, and tools and technologies. Cameron came to DBS from Gartner's Dataquest, the San Jose, California based market research firm, where he spent two years as associate director for Northeast Research, focusing on business applications and systems. Prior to Dataquest, he spent nine years at Chase Manhattan's electronic banking business in Lexington, Massachusetts, as MIS director and director of product management. He spoke to Iishwar Daas of Dataquest, CyberMedia on CIOs and the issues they face. Excerpts:

What is the current research theme at Forrester that CIOs need to be aware of?
The basic theme of our research is stability in core technologies; and IT processes open the door for new successful process-based business models. CIOs cite application deployment of new applications or upgrades to existing applications as the top priority area for IT spend in 2005. Infrastructure-related areas like disaster recovery, security and consolidation are the other major priorities.

We believe that the two emerging technologies: organic IT and executable Internet, offer the solution. While organic IT can be used to stabilize IT infrastructure, X Internet can enable new business models.

But are we there yet?
Of course. Take organic IT. Software now is interoperable through XML-based Web services, processors are adaptive through server provisioning and virtualization, storage is shared through virtualization and the network is unified. Some of the key organic IT components are blade servers, open source, redundant array of Internet links, grid computing and storage virtualization. And the same is true about X Internet with the range of devices and form factors that can store and access information. Our surveys show that average spending on emerging technologies will increase by 3% points between 2004 and 2006.

Haven't we heard before that CIOs should focus on business rather than the next emerging technology?
You are right. CIOs have no time for technology, in fact, technical proficiency is the last skill that is required by a CIO. Even the CIO's technical priorities sound non-technical.

Some of the top issues are: changing IT skill sets and attracting new talent, migrating to an IT shared services model-and rationalizing technology to support this, vendor management in an increasingly outsourced environment, balancing fit with organizations and processes, supporting business innovation and growth and regulatory compliance-Sarbanes-Oxley, Basel-II, etc.

What do you recommend for the CIOs?
High performance CIOs tell us that IT success requires visibility and a process focus. IT works with a broad set of processes and its role changes with each type of process.

Many IT shops struggle to work across organizations. For this, we propose the concept of portfolio management. Portfolio management underpins IT best practices. It entails the collection of all IT-based investments. This include both IT and business activities, managed at the level of organizational structures such as business units or geographies. Portfolio management spans investments' lifecycle and is bound by metrics. When various parts of the organization get connected, the common business services become middle office applications. These move far beyond integration and provide incremental rationalization.
A middle-office apps strategy is critical to supporting new cross-unit business models.

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