Posted by Ben Worthen

The joke used to be that the initials CIO stood for “career is over” because the corporate technology head was always one bad piece of software away from a pink slip. Today, the CIO role appears to be as stable as any other C-level position. But for how long?

The CIO’s reason to exist is fading, argues Chris Potts, a London-based consultant, in an opinion piece for CIO Magazine. In years past, the CIO was responsible for formulating a company’s IT strategy and for finding and vetting the technology that employees used. But IT is slowly ceding those responsibilities to the rest of the company. Tech companies rarely sell strategic software to the IT department anymore. For the last few years, this blogger has been asking tech vendors who in an organization they sell their software to, and the answer is almost always: directly to the business unit that will use it.

And the rise of easy-to-use Internet-based applications like Salesforce.com and Google documents is making it easier for the average employee to provide his or her own technology. Companies may not want to rely on employee self-service today, but that’s clearly the direction technology is moving.

Potts writes that he recently met with a company that is “struggling to see the value of having” a CIO. Instead, it’s thinking of putting one person in charge of servicing the company’s existing technology — this person would report to the COO — and creating a VP whose job would be to examine the return different investments deliver, whether they involve technology or not.