It might seem ironic for the leader of the company that blazed the trail for shadow IT to acknowledge that the CIO's role has ratcheted up several notches in importance. Yet in a sign of how, in the words of Marc Andreessen, “software is eating the world” and perhaps irrevocably altering the business landscape, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff says that the CEO is working closely with the CIO to architect digital transformations. Eventually, some of those CIOs will become CEOs, he said.
"We're in a new world where the CIO is redefining their role and the partnership that they have with the CEO today is, I think, never happened before in our industry,” Benioff said, speaking to about 100 CIOs at the Forbes CIO Summit in Half Moon Bay, Calif.