IT Needs to Be Integrated, Not Just Aligned, With Business

Leveraging SOA and understanding the burgeoning role of social computing will keep CIOs busy this coming year.

Insurance CIOs face the familiar challenges that confront IT executives in most other industries. But they also have a unique set of situations that can be ignored only at increasing levels of peril.

Jamie Bisker, IBM Global Business

The importance of perennial IT topics tends to be diluted, as they appear so often as top priorities for insurers. Themes such as business and IT alignment, controlling IT costs, improving service levels and dealing with regulatory/compliance issues need to be addressed in ways that enable better measurements of success to keep results relevant. The key seems to be integration with business units, not just alignment.

In terms of strategic thinking, some CIOs are seeing the value of providing thought leadership and coordinating its deployment as a way to position IT shops as sources of innovation beyond the bits and bytes of their normal roles. Finally, leveraging SOA and understanding the burgeoning role of social computing will keep CIOs busy this coming year.