"For 10 years the industry has tried to get IT on the boardroom agenda. Now removing IT from the boardroom agenda is the goal all organisations should strive to attain," says Tod Nielsen, COO of VMware.

This pronouncement from the world's largest virtualisation software company might appear to sound the general retreat of the profession back to the computer-room in the basement. But Nielsen is actually arguing that IT has, to date, succeeded in getting the attention of the board for all the wrong reasons: "cost overruns, system outages, delays..."

But cloud computing will change all that, he says, enabling organisations to deliver IT as a highly reliable service and remove it from the boardroom headache list. "Customers who have already made this journey have transformed discussion of IT in the boardroom from problems and failures to an essential element of strategic initiatives proposed as business-agenda items."

That is going to have a liberating effect on CIOs, he believes. "The role of the CIO is going to be incredible when IT comes off the boardroom agenda. Instead of being micro-managed by a board of directors, the CIOs are going to have freedom to solve real business problems, delivering real value."

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