"I agree with you that a CIO should have more involvement in business decisions and processes, and from this perspective a CIO should be a facilitator or enabler of this strategy by providing the technology, methods and practices that justify the strategic role of IT function and define its possibility of being part from the corporate table.

"A strategically oriented CIO should have multidisciplinary teams advocated in offering guidance, support and habilitation in technologies that instead of providing costs reductions via process optimization as it has been usual in the past should promote the usage of transformational technologies with business value as CRM, Knowledge Management, Business Intelligence and Web 2.0 applications where a strategically aligned IT function could be instrumental in achieving successful strategy execution.

"On business trends and crystal ball gazing I would say that at board level he should do his/her bit on strategy (development). You would at least expect some strategic scenario planning effort."

CIOs have made themselves an integral part of the decision process involved in formulating the corporate future. Perhaps CIOs have no more responsibility than other CxOs to dabble in fortune-telling, but surely the input they provide the rest of the top management team on what can be achieved with IT must be formulated with an eye to likely future directions. Noone can ever accurately predict the future, so any CIO making a forecast will make mistakes from time to time, but analysis made without an assessment of future trends and directions is surely pretty useless.

"The Best Way to Predict the Future is to Prevent It," pronounced Alan Kay recently, sending up his own words of 30-some years ago, when at Xerox PARC once famously said "The best way to predict the future is to invent it." CIOs may have none or Buckley's chance of preventing most likely future scenarios, but forewarned is also forearmed.

At the very least CIOs clearly need to know what other companies are doing, the innovations or failure they are achieving through application of IT, and their likely future direction.

But they should also, where possible, be working with the rest of senior management to guide future strategies, based on a reasonable reading of likely futures.

There are plenty of sources of information that can help with CIO make prospective analysis and help them ascertain likely futures. My prophecy? The most successful Future State CIOs will be those who get really good at gazing into their crystal balls and working out which techniques and technologies can given them the best reading of their - and their corporation's - likely future.