In my 13-year career as a management consultant, the one question new clients would always wrestle with when signing on an assignment was, “Will I get what I was promised?”  While we did our best to assure prospective clients with our words and actions, signing us on was, in the end, a leap of faith. Despite our excellent track record and reputation, I would sense their anxiety and healthy skepticism even as the imperative to get objective, external advice could not be ignored. I could not help but empathise with the dilemma our clients faced — you can’t avoid ‘outsourcing’ yet there is no way to ensure that the outsourcer will deliver.

CIOs today face the same dilemma with even greater risks. In our cover story this fortnight, we feature managed IT services as a key trend driven by an inexorable shift from on-premise IT to outsourcing of IT in all enterprises, big and small. Clearly, this trend will lead to a matching shift in the CIOs responsibilities — moving away from his fixation with technology procurement and operations towards managing SLAs and vendor relationships.

Furthermore, we find that trends such as BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) are fuelling the ‘consumerisation’ of IT.  As the social world permeates the enterprise world, CIOs will have to increasingly manage device proliferation and its attendant complexities in their overall IT strategy.

Mastering these trends is both critical and challenging. Trusting your in-house operations to a vendor is a huge change and requires a whole new management approach.  Likewise, managing the three widely accepted mobile platforms – Blackberry, iPhone and Android – across a plethora of devices is challenging the very fundamentals of enterprise IT management, from a standardisation mindset with a mass customisation revolution.

This cover story encapsulates these emerging trends, and discusses what it would take for CIOs to lead their enterprises through these changing times. Besides, we also provide you a peek into technologies that would find favour with enterprises in 2012.

By the way, your vendors are doing their bit to help!  HEIT, a US-based cloud services provider, has recently taken the wraps off a Virtual CIO group or vCIO, as they call it. Offered to its financial vertical customers, the vCIO promises to support its clients and guide them through audits, help them in strategic technology planning, and even be a part of the budgeting sessions, board meetings and IT steering committee meetings.

Guess that’s yet another new trend!