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I liked the recent post by Chris Anderson called Who needs a CIO? From my perspective the following summarizes his point:

CIOs, it turns out, are mostly business people who have been given the thankless job of keeping the lights on, IT wise. And the best way to ensure that they stay on is to change as little as possible.

What Chris says makes sense, and I believe this is true for some organizations.  But I think that, in order to survive, organizations must innovate.  Technology is an innovation enabler, especially technology that fuels collaboration and knowledge sharing.  In my humble opinion CIOs can’t expect to keep their jobs unless they sponsor technology that helps improve the bottom line, and I don’t necessarily think web 2.0 has caused CIOs to be innovative as innovation would have been a mandate when the title Chief Information Officer was created.

Certainly, in my professional experience, I’ve seen a lot of CIOs have very innovative, or at least non-traditional, perspectives on how new technology might help their organizations.  Usually it’s the management layer immediately below the CIO that staggers innovation as they have the most to lose from disruption to their routine, non-value-adding technology silos.

This is one of the reasons why Enterprise 2.0 is so compelling.  Transparency means CIOs will have direct exposure to the 25 year olds who have great ideas for how the enterprise might become more efficient and innovative, and that certainly will upset the people in the middle.