CIO as dinosaur

From Baseline/CIO Insight, a report on emerging technologies; specifically, a survey of CIOs of what technologies that they’re actually using. Some results that I find to show the incredible short-sightedness of many corporate CIOs is the percentage who find the following technologies “of no interest/not on the radar”:

• SaaS, 32%. How could this number of CIOs possibly have no interest in SaaS? Only one answer comes to mind: empire building.
• SOA, 30%. The percentage of CIOs who prefer to remain mired in legacy linguine.
• AJAX, 46% and RSS, 38%. How to they plan to deliver information, both interactively and via publication, in the future? This isn’t just an externally-facing issue; in large organizations, these technologies are equally important for serving it up to internal users.
• Social networking, including tagging, 51%. Although other things were mentioned in this category, I see tagging as the key contributor to a corporate environment here. How long will it be before all ECM systems have tagging as a standard feature? When will CIOs stop characterizing this as “allowing the lunatics to run the asylum” and just put the right categorization tools in the hands of their users?
• Wikis, 46%. Okay, I get why a lot of companies are still uncomfortable with blogs. But wikis for collaboration make a lot more sense than clogging up everyone’s email with multiple out-of-date copies of a Word file that everyone is trying to update at the same time. It’s only a matter of time before Microsoft adds wiki capabilities to SharePoint (if they haven’t already), at which time everyone will be using wikis below the CIO’s radar. David Berlind posted yesterday about how many IT leaders have never even heard of wikis, which is likely where the “not on the radar” is really coming from.

There are a lot of other equally shocking stats about just how far behind corporate CIOs are in their thinking. Many of my clients are large financial institutions, so I suppose that I shouldn’t be that shocked: if I polled them directly about these same issues, I’d likely get similar results. Unfortunately, that doesn’t give me much hope that these organizations are going to become a lot more efficient or offer better services to their customers any time soon.

On the BPM front, only 21% show as “deployed”, 19% “testing/piloting”, 27% “evaluating/tracking” and 32% “no interest/not on the radar”.

Update: I just saw this post on why AJAX and RSS matter for in-house user interfaces, particularly for BPM.

Update: Robert Scoble reports that wikis will, indeed, be in Sharepoint 2007. The meteor has landed, you guys can all just head for the tar pits.