Forget about who will be the next CInO (Chief Innovation Officer). According to IBM’s 2010 Global CEO Study, you might not have to look much further than the CEO’s chair. The full study can be found here.

According to the study, which surveyed over 1,500 CEOs from around the world, more than 60 percent of CEOs believe that industry transformation is the top factor contributing to uncertainty and indicates a need to discover innovative ways of managing an organization’s structure, finances, people, and strategy. This actually is not so different from the 2008 Global CEO Study, in which two-thirds of the respondents reported implementing extensive innovations, often in the business model itself.

So what is the CEO to do? Apparently they are ready to invite disruptive innovation and consider previously unheard-of ways to drastically change the enterprise. This is a far cry from the management lament of the past 2 years of financial turmoil, when the mantra was do-more-with-less and cut, cut, cut. more

In contrast with the first five decades of the software business, technology innovation was not much of a driving force in business applications over the past decade. It’s not that there weren’t steady evolutionary enhancements, but these did not have a fundamental impact on demand or competitive dynamics. Instead, the lack of a major technological catalyst created the business dynamic that characterized the 2000s: vendor consolidation.

The last big schism in enterprise software took place two decades ago with the introduction of client/server computing. That term “client/server” is misleading because it wasn’t just the architecture that was important in driving innovation and demand. It was wrapped up with several other threads of emerging technologies, including the mainstreaming of the relational database, event-driven programming languages, and the graphical user interface. When combined, these innovations made it far easier to create flexible business applications that could support a wider range of functions and processes. All of these elements reached the market within a couple of years of each other, so in hindsight it looks like one big event, but it was a convergence of several that made the difference.

I believe that innovation in enterprise applications in this coming decade will accelerate. This time around, in the next couple of years what might be different from the 2001-2010 timeframe is that several disparate threads arriving over a longer period of time may accelerate the obsolescence of existing business software. In-memory computing may be a game changer when combined with (for example) cloud computing, server virtualization, open source software, mobility, and tablet computing and other user interface devices that substantially enhance usability, utility, and the user experience. It’s true that each of these things has been around for a while and isn’t really “new.” However, as business computing has matured and become more complex, it takes longer for threads like these to coalesce into products and services that corporations will demand. If these new products prove attractive enough, they could spawn a wave of replacement of existing software.

(This is a shorter version of longer blog that you can read here.) ###

The 2011 AFP Business Outlook Survey was released earlier this week. The survey, which represents responses from more than 800 financial professionals in the U.S., took place from late November through December 10, 2010.

Among the highlights:

1. Nearly half of respondents — 48 percent — believe business conditions will show moderate improvement in 2011, while 47 percent predict conditions will remain the same. GDP will grow moderately, at 2.3 percent, according to survey participants. more

Looking ahead to 2011, I think that two of the most important risk management priorities will be people and profits.

I want to discuss people risk, which is something I do regularly (look here, here, and here).

A growing chorus of experts is zeroing in on the human element of risk management: how and why we make decisions about risk. To me, this element of risk-related decision-making has an information technology (IT) parallel. more

‘Tis the season for wish lists.

If you are a company of the profit-making persuasion, you could be wishing for “growth” (i.e., more sales, more profits, etc.). For an individual, a wish could be as simple as a job, preferably one with important responsibilities, good compensation, and a dependable future. more