Here’s something your CIO can do for you: integrate all those business apps

It’s time to reconsider the role of the chief information officer (CIO).

While new technologies have dramatically changed the way businesses operate in the last several years, the structure at the top has largely remained the same. The rapid growth of applications designed for specific business users, especially those offered through SaaS and mobile platforms, has led to what many refer to as the “consumerization of IT.” But the traditional CIO still often assumes the role of a gatekeeper, making top-down decisions about which technologies the company will adopt and when.

Instead, CIOs should focus as much time on managing the integration of different applications as they do on overseeing specific information technology. Rather than maintaining several strictly controlled services run across dedicated on-premises servers, today’s CIO must be able to deal with a sprawling collection of applications, devices, and databases. This means an increasing focus on integration, that is, figuring how to make the all technologies flowing into the modern organization work best for the company as whole.

When IT was a smaller part of the organization, CIOs could reasonably assert control over all things digital. But now that applications and data play a crucial role in every department from marketing to product management to customer service, it’s unreasonable to expect the CIO to be able to evaluate and manage all of the diverse technologies business users want to employ.

Channeling all these decisions through the CIO would not only create bottlenecks, it would also leave important decision-makers, the business users themselves, without a voice in the process.

The new CIO should be able to empower business users to make their own decisions about new technologies while also ensuring they stay connected with the rest of the enterprise. While the CIO must relinquish some control over the types of applications and services the company adopts, this does not mean the need to ensure that information flows throughout the organization quickly and efficiently disappears. This is where a greater focus on integration becomes important. By opening up different programs using application programming interfaces (APIs) that allow them to “talk” to each other in the same language, the company can continue to adopt the latest technologies without setting up barriers between departments.

Furthermore, integration-focused CIOs will be in a better position to adapt to the emerging digital economy and the Internet of things (IoT) that is creating new revenue channels as companies learn how to better connect their digital processes across different applications, devices, departments, and partners. According to a recent report from Gartner, “endpoints of the IoT will grow at a 35 percent CAGR [compound annual growth rate] from 2013 through 2020, reaching an installed base of 25 billion units.” Just as phone systems redefined how people communicate across businesses, APIs will transform how systems and devices connected by the IoT communicate in the future.

This means today’s CIO will succeed best by managing a new generation of APIs that expose different applications to appropriate internal and external users. These modern interfaces must be standardized and scalable in order to link existing systems to new endpoints and data sources as soon as they become available. When new applications and endpoints emerge, the CIO must be able to find a way to integrate them into the company’s IT structure or risk putting roadblocks ahead of innovative and efficient business processes. For the new CIO the question is not whether the application will help the company — today the business user has already made that decision — the question is how to make it work with everything else.

George Gallegos is chief executive of cloud integration company Jitterbit.