When CIO Journal publishes an article entitled Why You Should (Eventually) Fire Your CIO, you know that there’s something big going on in IT land.

The authors, Dean Fischer and Eric Dean, make a simple case: as software has come to eat the world, everyone in the company needs to become more IT-savvy. In traditional companies, that means C-level executives cannot defer to a specialist CIO:

One of the key reasons the C-suite has not yet developed tech maturity is the presence of the CIO. Executives feel that they can deflect technology responsibilities to the CIO in part because the very existence of a technology executive provides an excuse to do so (why else is he or she there?) In the same way that no self-respecting firm would hire a chief quality officer today (quality should be everyone’s job), firms risk perpetuating the technology equivalent of a chief quality officer when they hire a CIO.

Not long ago, there were few realistic alternatives because enterprise technology was complex and shrouded in what might as well have been arcane mysteries.

Now, technology is permeating what were once the least technical business functions.  For example, negotiations of a 10-year union contract required extensive changes to the work rules of entrenched airline ERPs and the cost and feasibility of getting those changes itself became an aspect of the negotiations. A tech-savvy negotiator would be in a much better position to handle that situation than either a tech-illiterate labor relations executive or a tech-savvy CIO with no labor relations experience.

But, as the hedge in the title implies, the Deans stop short of the logical conclusion: diffusing the role of CIO across other C-level roles. Their argument is that the other C-level execs are not up to the task today, perhaps because they are implicitly thinking about the 50 and 60 year-old executives of many corporations.

As an intermediary step, they argue for looking for tech smarts in high potential hires:

Moving forward, firms need to keep an eye out for technological competence in potential hires. Today’s executives struggle with a generational gap that few have managed to bridge with regards to technology. Younger employees have grown up with technology and while they lack their elders’ years of experience, companies should keep an open mind during the hiring process. Especially in IT-heavy environments, a less experienced executive with a greater affinity for technology might make more sense than a seasoned technophobe.

Fischer and Dean are unwilling to make the more controversial statement: many of the senior executives in the Fortune 1000 have inadequate technology understanding needed for today’s economy. Even worse they are doing little to get up to speed on issues like big data, cloud computing, and mobility. They are something like the naval admirals that thoroughly understood sailing ships at the time of the first steamships, who resisted a transition until their ships sank under their feet.

As I recently wrote,

The CIO is rapidly starting to be viewed as a holdover of an earlier time, or a role overseeing the dismantling of the 20th century IT operation. In the early days of electricity, businesses had a VP of Electricity, who had a slightly deeper knowledge of this innovation, but once electricity found its way into all many of devices — like typewriters, pencil sharpeners, and tools on the factory floor — the job became irrelevant. We are going to see that transition in the next few years, and the giant IT corporations that grew by working with IT staff to deliver Information Technology to businesses are going to have to pull themselves inside out or die.

Perhaps the most important role for today’s CIOs is to create a crash plan to invalidate their own job in the next few years. This would be based on distributing IT expertise and controls to others in the organization. An interim step might be to create director-level positions in the other functional areas of the company reporting to the heads of HR, marketing, engineering, manufacturing, and so on. Those IT directors could work more closely with the functional heads, and other directors. (Note that this recommendation is based on the assumption of a very traditional organization structure, but that is the norm, today.)

In the first phase of this transition, the CIO needs to steer the dynamic toward other C-level executive taking ownership of the IT agenda in their operations and workforce, and the IT staff transitioning to a research, development, and support organization. That would be great on the job training, and the first step toward retiring the VP of Electricity.