10 predictions for what the CIO role will look like in 2020

6. Cyber warfare will turn the CIO into a general.It's no secret that the modern CIO has to deal with cyber attacks on a routine basis. Nevertheless, as John Thielens, CSO at enterprise security company Axway explained, cyber warfare will reach a heightened state and will require an nearly militaristic stance by the CIO. One fallout from increased attacks: Internet neutrality principles will when all is said and done crumble. That means a CIO might have to move into a role of negotiating peering agreements between Internet service providers. "We'll see national firewalls going up as a way to keep cross-border relationships safe," Thielens says. "We'll see the management of interconnectivity between large global businesses become significantly more challenging."

7. BYOD will be the norm.Henceforth IT department, employees will bring their own devices to work and IT helps makes them secure. Today, that remains an exception to the rule -- -in most cases, IT nevertheless provides hardware to employees and manages the infrastructure. Tim Naramore, CTO of Masergy, a managed network provider, says IT will as a general rule be charged with managing employee-owned devices. By and large, workers will find their own computing devices and use them at work.

8. Outsourcing will use AI.One key trend for CIOs: Outsourcing will move from managing physical teams that handle incoming calls or tech support issues to a more complex role dealing with computer AI. Greg Pierce, cloud strategy officer at Tribridge, an enterprise consulting company, cites the example of a call center. Today, it exists in a building where reps answer the phone. By 2020, speech recognition systems will advance to the point where a robot can answer the phone and provide tech support, using a digital voice that sounds the same as a human. That means the CIO will have to manage this legion of "bots" and the decision trees for support, not the people doing the work.

9. CIOs will impact business direction.Many CIOs of today meet with business leaders and contribute to the overall direction of the company. Hereafter, the CIO won't just contribute. He or she may be the main thought leader, moving from an advisory role to one more focused on direct research. Masergy's Naramore says the CIO will be involved in every key business decision, from marketing to product design to logistics, because innovation will play a pivotal role in those areas.

10. Analytics will be increasingly important.Making decisions means having good data, and most CIOs have learned this lesson. Hereafter, explains Oliver T. Bussmann, executive vice president and CIO at SAP AG, the CIO will delve even deeper into analytics as a way to predict future research trends.

Place in the C-suite

"He or she needs to earn a place in the C-suite by looking into the future of where the business is going, and determining the right innovation roadmap to enable new business models, to improve margin, or if not give their company a leg up on the competition," Bussmann says. "In many cases this will mean leveraging in-memory computing and analytics to react to and capitalize on trends in real-time. Running massive internal infrastructures will no longer be a priority as nearly everything runs in the cloud; nevertheless, data security will be of paramount importanceÂ-and there will potentially be integration challenges."

John Brandon is a former IT manager at a Fortune 100 company who now writes about innovation. He has written more than 2,500 articles in the past 10 years. You can follow him on Twitter @jmbrandonbb. Follow everything from CIO.com on Twitter @CIOonline, on Facebook, and on Google +.

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