At its sell-out symposium in Orlando, technology analyst Gartner noted that since 2013 650 million new physical objects have come online; 3D printers have become a $US1 billion dollar market; 10 percent of cars are now connected; and the number of chief data officers and chief digital officer positions have doubled. “In 2015, all of these things will double again,” according to Gartner.

But Peter Sondergaard, senior vice president at Gartner and global head of research, acknowledged that 38 percent of total IT spending now came from outside the IT department. “By 2017, it will be over 50 percent,” he said, as business units took on the mantle of internal technology start-ups driving internal innovation.

“Digital start-ups sit inside your own organisation, in your marketing department, in HR, in logistics and in sales. Your business units are acting as technology start-ups.”

That poses a significant challenge for chief information officers who are still expected to provide the human resources for IT projects and manage IT risk.
“The new digital start-ups in your business units are thirsting for data analysts, software developers and cloud vendor management staff, and they are often hiring them faster than IT. They may be experimenting with smart machines, seeking technology expertise IT often doesn’t have,” according to Sondergaard.

“You must build talent for the digital organisation of 2020 now. Not just the digital technology organisation, but the whole enterprise. Talent is the key to digital leadership.”

While skilling up the enterprise for a digital future will fall to the CIOs, so too will managing associated IT risk. In its 2015 CIO Survey of 2800 CIOs from around the world Gartner found that 89 percent of CIOs agreed that enterprises faced new and higher order risks, with the majority worried that these risks were currently not being adequately managed.

But these risk concerns may be a bi product of the CIO’s natural evolution to what Gartner describes as “control-style pragmatic leaders,” which it says are in any case ill-suited to the digital era which demands greater vision.

Three quarters of CIOs acknowledged to Gartner than they needed to change their leadership style over the next three years from “control first” to “vision first” with the most successful leaders delegating some of their responsibilities in order to free up time for planning and engaging with senior executives about what might be possible in the future.