Guest post by Suheb Siddiqui and Chetan Shetty
A veteran CIO recently said, “The last few months felt like I time traveled back to the 1980s. Business stakeholders are demanding the applications they want, designed the way they like, and at a speed dictated by their priorities.” He wasn’t talking about an AS400 based Cobol program; he was talking about custom apps written on industry standard platforms, provided by numerous Platform as a Service (PaaS) providers such as Salesforce, Oracle and ServiceNow.
Our industry has undergone numerous transitions. In the 1980s and part of the 1990s, business users were in control. They could pick their favorite “best of breed” applications, and design and customize them how they wanted. Integration and governance was expensive and difficult. Then, Y2K fueled the growth of Megasuite ERPs. Starting in the late 1990s, IT started controlling the agenda and strong governance led to cost efficiencies, albeit at the expense of user satisfaction.
Fast forward to 2016, Software as a Service (SaaS) and PaaS solutions are empowering users to be in control again. As a result, we are witnessing a growing gap between the total IT spend of an organization, which is increasing as users buy their own SaaS solutions, and the IT budget controlled by the CIO, which is under constant cost pressure. Successful CIOs have to find new strategies to bridge this growing “Digital Divide.”
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