Sometimes CIO is the Chief Information Officer or Chief Innovation Officer or even Chief Intelligence Officer.

Not according to Nicholas Carr. In a recent post he announces another step on the road from CIO to CEO (Chief Electricity Officer).

Nicholas blogs about an announcement from Sun: a data center in a container. The data-center-in-a-box is a readymade data center in shipping containers at a starting price of a half million bucks a pop. And Nicholas comments:

In many ways, the containerized data center resembles the standardized electricity-generation system that Thomas Edison sold to factories at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. Manufacturers bought a lot of those systems to replace their complex, custom-built hydraulic or steam systems for generating mechanical power. Edison’s off-the-shelf powerplant turned out to be a transitional product - though a very lucrative one. Once the distribution network - the electric grid - had matured, factories abandoned their private generating stations altogether, choosing to get their power for a monthly fee from utilities, the ultimate black boxes.

Something similar will happen - is happening - with computing, but how exactly computing assets end up being divided between companies and utilities remains to be seen. In the meantime, commodity data centers, in various physical and virtual forms, should prove increasingly popular to companies looking to radically simplify their computing infrastructure and reduce the single biggest cost of corporate computing today: labor.

Nicholas seems to wander between hardware, software and information. Modern IT is as much about process as is about information (and much less about hardware). Nobody says that a wide area networks really adds value, but one should not place process modeling and simulation (for example) on the same plateau with operation system installation.

Back in 1960’s having a computer up and running was a great achievement on it’s own. Today It is muuuch more than that.

Depending on your definition of IT, IT may or may not matter to an enterprise. Unfortunately Nicholas still uses a 1960’s definition of IT.

What do YOU think?