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HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW April 26, 2011, 1:02PM EST

The CIO as Corporate Psychic

Whether chief information officers like it or not, everyone expects them to generate IT predictions, says Harvard blogger Robert Plant

By Robert Plant

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Posted on Harvard Business Review: April 25, 2011 12:04 PM

Every day on my way to work I pass a store offering psychic readings, and I'm often tempted to stop in and ask what lies ahead in the tech world. Is the "cloud" just a passing phase? Will "social analytics" tools prove to be reliable? Will they integrate with current Business Intelligence systems? What impact will terahertz frequencies have on communication technologies?

Those are the kinds of questions that CIOs get all the time. Chief information officers are expected to see deeply into the future and generate IT predictions that companies can build their strategies around. Most CIOs don't like being cast in the role of corporate psychic, but there's nothing they can do about it. So here's some advice on how to make the best of this role and do a better job of seeing the future.

Don't follow the herd. It can be reassuring to sign up with one of the leading consulting firms, which perform solid research and are probably a notch more reliable than the corner psychic. But overreliance on these firms leads to industry groupthink, and complexity-theory research tells us that it's impossible to predict the behavior of a large system (such as the...