The ‘Converged’ CIO

New challenges, technologies, strategies, and policies greet the literally thousands of CIOs and IT executives across the United States. Whether it’s long-term strategy planning, to dealing with immediate and short-term fires that erupt, the modern day responsibilities of today’s pool of IT executives is nothing to laugh at. Like it or not, “convergence”, as a whole, has molded the modern CIO into a technology, strategy, and personnel traffic cop. In the early 21st century, the ideas and topics surrounding convergence, or the merging of multiple technologies on a single strategic environment, was considered a lifesaver for many in the field. Companies such as Cisco capitalized on, and marketed forward the idea of a single vendor for multiple complex solutions: video, voice, and data. From an IT executive’s standpoint, it is important to ask whether convergence has served its purpose. The supporting ideas and technologies that make up a conglomerate theme such as unified communications are independently important, but do they fit together, and in an appropriate manner? Does this strategy make it simpler, or more complicated? IT decision making will not be any easier from this point forward. With the ideas of tight integration and high inter-dependency between systems, the challenges ahead are only about to rise. Highly integrated, and interdependent environments demand a workforce with blurred lines. No longer can email administrators simply manage a strict text-based email environment. Now, we have unified communications strategies (enter Microsoft OCS), that intermingle voice and text-based messaging and collaboration. What are your views? Does the “ultimate integration” scenario scare you as an IT decision maker? Why or why not?