It looks like a standalone post is needed in response to the Gamification: opportunity for CIO or marketing post.

Crowdsourcing revealed you can get people to engage in almost anything if you make a 'game' out of it, including mundane tasks. Ironically, sometimes the more inconsequential the reward for the desired behavior the more of an inducement it was. 

How to Become a Rainmaker is one of my all time favorite books which offers a very useful blueprint for becoming a CIO rainmaker. This post is not a book review of How to Become a Rainmaker. It is about how CIO’s can retool their thinking to that of a CIO Rainmaker in order to raise their value contribution and set themselves apart from their peers.

The role of IT was never static. Technology changes alone bring about major changes in the role of IT and influence the future of IT.  This really should not be debateable since we see everyday how technology changes redefine various professions or business functions through automation and simplification. Yet, when you describe a future of IT that is less strategic people get upset and accuse you of being a contrarian just for the sake of it.

If more IT departments functioned like human resources or facilities and worried less about being strategic there would be fewer complaints about IT and CIO’s would be happier for it. The support for this belief comes from the consumerization and democratization of technology which is accelerating the shift to commodity services and enabling more decision making by non-IT folks while rendering more and more of the technology stack decisions irrelevant.

Evaluating IT investments for funding is one process where using a simpler approach is not always better. That is because the process of evaluating IT investments should involve an two step process for each project under consideration in order to support an objective IT project ranking of all proposals and ultimately, the IT project selection decision.