Two stories this week illustrate how much data will change the role of the CIO in the next decade.

The first comes from CIO.com, with a story about how the role of the CIO will change by 2020. In every example, it’s data that drives the change through apps, the cloud and services. The apps will replace the software and even the SaaS services we know of today. The cloud will no longer be something you manage. It will become the platform for what you do. And services will define the way the CIO interacts with the community.

Some examples:

• Microsoft will lose its hegemony in the enterprise as more companies look to mobile as the means for people to access company information.
• IT will move to the cloud. We’re the last generation that will actually know where IT is located. In 2020, we will work within a community who will communicate soley in the cloud.
• Welcome to the robot age. In the future, the CIO will manage fewer people. Instead, machine to machine communication will manage our identity, building security, emergency response that will be conducted by robots and drones that will be the first responders on the scene.
• The CIO will become a service provider to individuals. Workers will manage as many as 15,000 business relationships who they communicate with using apps and mobile devices over distributed networks in high resolution collaborative environments. The CIO will need to adapt to enterprise networks where these relationships coalesce and people collaborate among teams.

In a Techcrunch post this morning, Raj De Datta, the CEO and co-founder of BloomReach, argues that big data apps herald the end of software-as-a-service (SaaS). That’s an interesting twist. Already we are seeing a relatively new form of service get eclipsed by a new form of data driven technology. It reminds me of a post Klint Finley wrote about the new requirement to push data, not pages. Big data apps now use Hadoop and NoSQL on the back-end to store vast amounts of data that becomes part of a data stream driven by machine learning and recommendation engines. SaaS providers are starting to adapt. They have traditionally used a network of Web pages that provide a service that resembles on-premise software more than anything else. The software is just getting repackaged for the Web.   In the future, the data will fuel the network. Its power will come far more from outside the network. Services will accelerate the value of that data that will be presented through apps more than anything else.

IT will be in your car, your house or in a layer of data that you access through your app. Services will be the means for how all IT is delivered. The role of the CIO is changing. The community will dictate how that change happens.