CIO: Go for broke (erage)

In the world of finance you have trading institutions. Some take on the risk of buying instruments that they may or may not be able to sell. This is a risk they take and they offload the cost of that risk on someone else, typically the customer. However some organisations don’t want to be in that business so will only act as an intermediary or brokerage between two parties who are willing to trade with each other. This seems like a more sensible model to me.

I would encourage CIOs to keep this brokerage model in mind as they move forward with their technology investment. Granted that mature organisations will have a legacy architecture that no outsourcer in their right mind would want to take on given the associated learning curve and limited market of one (the original owner) they could offer it to.

Even so I think the sooner CIOs can move to a brokerage model the sooner they can focus on the more interesting elements of being a digital leader. In turn, the sooner the tech players can offer business services rather than just mips and megabytes the sooner this model will fly.

This is a real opportunity for CIOs and the Tech sector to work in partnership.