There is an excellent article in Information Weekposted last week that discusses how CIOs are gaining influence in companies to make both strategic and tactical corporate decisions. This comes in response to the steady increase of new tools in the market that help businesses do core activities better than they can.
The dot com crash was filled with examples of startups that failed because they were trying to appeal to a very broad audience in order to capture as much market as possible. We now see the emergence of startups who do only a few things, but do them very well. This model presents its own challenges, but at least employees of these new startups can be focused on a very clear, distinct set of goals.
Established companies are now looking to these startups for innovative ways to stay ahead of the competition and bolster their own offerings. Much of this innovation is done through technology, and thus the expanded influence of the CIO role.
Furthermore, startups are making it very easy for CIOs to evaluate a wide range of products to find the best fit. Many companies, like BrainKeeper, offer no-obligation free trials and a pay-per-month option so that the risk of implementation is very low. And switching can be very simple; since we can import content from a MediaWiki system, you can be up and running with a new BrainKeeper wiki in days- with zero implementation and maintenance costs.
There are also a large number of new offerings that come to market every day- particularly in the Web 2.0 space, so a high ranking technology officer is needed to manage the efforts to sift through these products to find the ones that really match the goals of the corporation. As startups fail, more take their place so that there is never a truly established set of tools. While Google's office suite has yet to be proven, they do show that even the most established players in the market may not be the best for everyone.
