The role of the CIO in the future

With high tech readily available “off the shelf” and probably from an outsourced cloud service, what is the role of the CIO in 10 or 15 years?

A world where IT is perceived as essential but not strategic is an ugly place to be.

Source: The CIO is becoming the HVAC guy | Computerworld

The author suggests the role of the future CIO is to provide a smorgasbord of IT options from which others can select, and to gracefully manage the end of life and shutdown of legacy systems. Plus, as technology advances, much of it has also been simplified to the point that end users make their own decisions (for better or worse). But think: Once upon a time, we hired a group to develop, say, a manufacturing cost analysis software project. Then users began to develop practically the same thing in Excel using VBA – all by themselves. Today, they just buy something from the cloud.