I don't know for certain, but a good guess would be a lack of integration with other tools and data bases. That seems to be what people around our office seem to gripe about. I can only imagine this getting more complex and problematic once organizations attempt to tap into the 'sound and fury' of social media to gain more and better sales insights.

'Clashes' make headlines but as John points out, they don't always make sense or aren't grounded in reality. When you think of it, there are built-in conflicts among virtually all C titles in any organization. Fortunately there is more synergy baked into the equation. The trick is a really good CEO that gets everyone rowing in the same direction and   not at counter-purposes to one another.

As always, 'it depends'. Surely when it comes to Big Data, the gap is monstrously large. The Wall Street Journal recently cited a McKinsey survey that claims demand for data scientists - the key human element in the Big Data puzzle - will outstrip supply by up to 60%. Similarly Hadoop skills demand will outstrip supply in the near term. But how soon will most organizations really need these skills? I'm not so sure. It may be 12, 18 or even 24 months out. Also, this may sound anti-thetical, but there could emerge a short term supply-demand imbalance in COBOL skills too as the last of the old line big enterprise systems are brought into the 21st century, with the architects that assembled them disappearing as fast as WWII veterans.

Because the role of the CIO is evolving I don't think necesarily means the CIO should be replaced or abolished. And the reason is that the core responsibility seems to remain largely the same, and that is oversight of the organization's information resources and increasing one-to-one alignment thereof with business strategies and goals. That much as remained pretty constant over the last 30 years, I believe. I think what does change as time goes on is the make-up of the IT staff itself, particulalry as more and more infrastructure is not owned or even managed. So we'll see a logical phasing out of what had been titles that have been IT staples and the emergence of key officers and staff, like maybe a CAO (chief analytics officer) and his/her many minions of data scientists. It all still gets rolled up beneath the office of the CIO.

Doug when I started in this business in 1981 the management ranks then were filled with DP managers (as in data processing) and MIS Directors. MIS kind of morphed into IT directors but still there wasn't a whole lot being done to tightly couple data and information to business goals and strategies. The MIS directors and that role did disappear and were replaced by what we now know as the CIO. So there is a historical precedent for a certain ebb and flow in this profession, and it is almost always driven by massive, underlying changes in the actual technology. The emergence of the CIO coincided with the birth of the PC and end user computing. That role certainly matured as the Internet age unfolded. Now we are talking about consumerization, Big Data and a major shift in how IT services are delivered (cloud). So yeah, these changes are inspiring spirited conversations around the role of the CIO, but my point here is that this all evolutionary and in some ways even predictable.

At first blush, it is tempting to jump all over the Yahoo CEO and hurl all sorts of Luddite epithets at her. She certainly doesn't help her cause when she builds a nursery next to her office so she can spend quality time with her baby. But once you get past the what does seem like workplace elitism here, the essential question really boils down to 'Is telecommuing right for every company', and the easy answer is "No." There are unique aspects to any company make it a stronger contender for having some or all or most all workers telecommute to some extent. But I will say this. If the reason for not allowing this increasingly expected benefit is that senior management inherently doesn't trust workers to get their work done when they are out of sight of their managers, then that is a troubled company. Because if they are goofing off at home or in some virtual office, they'll do the same around the water cooler in your own office. I've managed literally hundreds of people so I speak with some experience here.