In less than five years' time, the CIO role, according to CIOs themselves, is destined to become either an executive leader of business change or absorbed into another role. This prediction comes from face-to-face research by a leading CIO headhunter, Cathy Holley. Holley undertook the research in 2002, asking CIOs to envision their role 10 years into the future. Destiny takes time to unfold, but we can now see their conclusion being borne out, which is testament to their vision.

The CIO's traditional role managing IT operations explains why this journey is a long one. About the same time that Holley was capturing CIOs' visions of their future role, my own company was exploring the maturity of organizations' strategic IT management. Of the CIOs in our survey, 69 percent said that the main focus of their company's IT strategy was on operations and service management. For CIOs to turn around these historic expectations of themselves and their strategies takes time and persistent tactics.

Now, the need for corporate leadership in change has never been greater and is unlikely to recede. Over the next three years, two-thirds of CEOs worldwide are planning extensive business-model innovation, and three quarters are actively entering new markets, according to the 2008 IBM Global CEO Survey, "The Enterprise of the Future." However, IBM concluded, while CEOs are planning significant change they are not confident of their ability to manage it. The economic climate must only add to those doubts. Investments that collectively change the business model—in IT and everything else—must be as efficient and value-creating as possible.

Those same CEOs ought to be doubly concerned because technology-sparked developments such as Web 2.0—and the enterprise version of it—are changing the business model anyway. According to a panel of venture capitalists looking "Beyond Web 2.0" during a recent innovation conference at Cambridge University, Web 2.0 is altering the relationship between employee and employer, putting each of us at the center of our own unique networks of collaborators and knowledge-sharers. And it is already more of a social and cultural movement than a technological one.

Web 2.0 has also meant a shift in the nature of change itself. It represents a trend toward throwaway investments in change at employee and team levels, if not corporately. The venture capitalists' perspective is that the churn in Web 2.0 applications and beyond will be much faster than we've seen before. This, and all the above factors, influence the way they are making investments. Although investments in changing one's business model are not predicated like those of venture capitalists, on an exit strategy, we need to let these factors influence us, too.