Paulo Sousa

IBM has released its Global CEO Survey 2008. According to 1000+ CEOs the company of tomorrow will be:

• Hungry for Change - capable of changing quickly and successfully; not merely responding to trends, but shaping trends.
• innovative Beyond Customer Imagination - surpasses the expectations of increasingly demanding customers by deep collaborative relationships.
• Globally Integrated - business is strategically designed to access the best capabilities, knowledge and assets from wherever they reside in the world and apply them wherever required in the world.
• Disruptive By Nature - radically challenges its business model, reinventing itself and its entire industry.
• Genuine, Not Just Generous - go beyond philanthropy and compliance and reflect genuine concern for society in all actions and decisions. 

Interestingly, IBM also has a companion report with the Implications for the CIO from this survey. There you can find that among the many roles a CIO will have to play are 1) Catalyst for change; 2) Expert on the “art of the possible”; and 3) Guru of risk management.CIOs will have to ensure that their IT team enables the prevously listed 5 characteristics of the company of tomorrow (or as IBM calls it "Enterprise of the Future"). This will require effective integration of business and technology perspectives and the creation of flexible and scalable technology systems and infrastructures. The report continues with specific 'advice' for each of the characteristic.

• Hungry for Change - transforming IT applications, services and infrastructures to make them flexible, extensible and secure thru Well-managed enterprise architectures, Service-oriented architectures, Virtualizationand Multisourcing and shared services frameworks.
  
• innovative Beyond Customer Imagination - enabling collaboration across and beyond the enterprise and turning data into insight by collaboration and social networking capabilities, Web 2.0 applications, and Context-specific, self-help portals.
• Globally Integrated - moving toward a shared services model and enabling integrated business operations and supply chains thru Integrated supply chains, Integrated financial organizations, enterprise architecture and global management strategy, unified communications and collaboration capabilities, social networking tools, Strategic exploitation of global enterprise resource planning.
  
• Disruptive By Nature - preparing to support the evolving business models of the enterprise, including acquisitions, mergers and divestitures by business process modeling, enterprisewide information architecture.
  
• Genuine, Not Just Generous - working to reduce the IT footprint and associated energy use, and to support the enterprise’s broader social responsibilities.

And of course do all this with an ever increassing pressure to decrease budget spending.