Interesting idea surfaced yesterday during the OMG's Business Ecology Initiative (and reinforced by today's session on SOA, BPM and Cloud). As the industry is moving into an age of choice in computing platforms, the role of Information Technology as a business unit may be changing as well. Rather than building custom applications as a norm, the focus may become integration of SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS offerings in the cloud. This is not a traditional IT operating model - it more resembles a system integrator operating model. And hence the surfacing of the idea that every CIO should have a strategy to address the General Contractor of Cloud services.

This has tremendous implications (as Todd Biske already tweeted) on service-centricity of technology departments - success seems unlikely without these capabilities as part of IT Core. It also has an interesting corollary to integration (or LEANing) of business process of IT. A fully functional Office of CIO becomes a necessity, and not a nice to have.

AAB