Over the last decade, the Chief Information Officer (CIO) has become the go-to guy, or gal, in any networking organization. And ever since, he or she has been saddled with a near-impossible task: cutting the operating expenses of the company while simultaneously multiplying its analytics capabilities, back office performance and service offerings.

Yes, the Chief Technology Officer has dealt with the same belt-tightening restrictions while meeting insatiable bandwidth demands. But technology leaders have a significant advantage over their IT brethren. CTOs have been able to whittle the number of vendors they manage to a handful. They work in the part of the industry that was weaned on and still lives by standards. Therefore, their left hand usually knows that their right hand is doing. It’s called interoperability.

The CIO must somehow find a way to make 30 or more software vendors – all of which think they have built the better mousetrap, are using the latest protocol and often address a mere snippet of the fulfillment or support processes necessary to operate – share their data in an accurate, cohesive and verifiable manner. Standards? Yes, they have standards. But those are employed primarily for modeling a solution, not for designing the processing engines or building the application interfaces that are supposed to make their systems talk to each other.

The CIO’s job is further complicated by requests from every department in the company, all of which have suddenly come to the same realization about the value of data and would like specific reports delivered to them on a silicon platter.

In a report this week from BT Global Services and Datamonitor, the CIO’s job has now been defined as such: “enabling workers to discover and access the intelligence they need to excel in their work.”

Faced with still finding interoperable software architecture to support the network, this additional internal support role is testing the resources of the IT department. As the study shows, and as we report here, one quarter of senior executives think they have more data than they can make sense of and almost half of them (47 percent) don’t believe they have enough data to make a decision. So CIOs must not only find ways to collect the necessary data, but to apply enough intelligence to make it useful for everyone, each according to his or her needs.

It is no wonder that CIOs are now rethinking the wisdom of the first part of their charge these last few years: cutting operational costs. They are now blaming inadequate software solutions for their companies’ ability to think globally at an enterprise level, calling them a barrier to success.

It will be interesting as we start this new year, still recession bound, whether or not this newfound awareness of the importance of meaningful IT solutions will result in a surge of spending. If that is the case, it could be a good year in the ol’ BSS/OSS after all.

E-mail me at heyBOSS@vpico.com or click on the comment button below.