Since it is virtually impossible to find all needed analytical skills resident in the same human being, it might be wise to adopt an 'ensemble' approach to your organization's deficit in those skills. Insider (registration required)

Knowing the future is a big part of the new IT skill set. But if you are going to find the future, you have to know where to look for it.

In an era when any real-world object can be IP-addressable, connectedness will become an important metric.

What business is IT in today? What business should it be in tomorrow? What should the 'I' in 'CIO' signify?

Here's my No. 1 forecast for 2013: We will start telling better stories. In the new year, the IT career guillotine will sever the necks of those less facile in the narrative arts.

Futuring is not what you do when you are finished with the imagined real work of operations.

The organizations that will prosper in the future are those led by people who have imagined a future they want to live in.

Victor Hugo, the great writer of 19th-century France, said, "You can resist an invading army; you cannot resist an idea whose time has come." The same can be said of technologies.

Welcome to the age of disruption.

We stand today on the brink of momentous years, a decade or so that will change how we work, learn, play, pay, heal and relate. All of this interests me, but nothing more so than what it will mean for the provisioning of information technology.

Sustainability, or creating economic prosperity without wreaking ecological havoc, is very much on the minds of executives at big brand companies like Coca-Cola, American Greetings and UPS.

The role that IT plays in value creation should concern the very top levels of management. That being so, your company's board of directors should be well versed in what is happening in IT .

To a large extent, our fears define us. Our earliest bipedal ancestors probably mostly had fears about ingestion -- either being eaten or not having enough to eat. The literature and art of the Victorians, as Julie Wosk notes in Breaking Frame: Technology and the Visual Arts in the Nineteenth Century , reflected a popular psychosis fixated on fears of being blown up by misengineered technology, being accelerated half out of one's mind on a train or being maimed when a train went off the tracks.

I recently surveyed the vendor, analyst and trade-show landscape seeking to get a snapshot of current thinking about cloud computing . I came away with two visceral conclusions. The first is that vendor marketing on this topic is terrible. One would be hard-pressed to find more gibberish per pixel than the typical vendor or analyst PowerPoint presentation on cloud computing. The second conclusion is that no one really knows anything about what will happen to IT after the cloud becomes a mainstream reality.

Most CIOs are dinosaurs: out of place in the world that is taking shape, and headed for mass extinction.