Just heard back from outgoing Capital One CIO Gregor Bailar, who's departure I wrote about below and promised a response from the horse's mouth. Capital One, you may know, was the top company in the InformationWeek 500 list two years ago. Check out the last paragraph in Gregor's response about his insight into the future role of the CIO in this industry -- very interesting and right in line with some of my own previous postings...Bailar responds regarding his imminent departure from Capital One and a very successful career as a CIO:

"I have a lot of interests beyond my corporate role. Philanthropy has always been a passion of mine and while I was able to pursue this to a degree while here at Capital One, in order to really make a greater impact, I wanted to focus and give the time to pursue some of those interest more fully ? so I decided to take the plunge. I am exploring what that will mean and how to best be useful. I spent a fair bit of time in India throughout my career. First, as CEO of a company that brought Indian technologists to work on Wall Street. Next, running Citibank's overseas development centers, including one in India, then again with NASDAQ working throughout Asia, and most recently as Capital One has explored various global sourcing opportunities. These experiences had a tremendous personal impact on me and in a recent trip to India with my family, we saw a great deal of potential for outreach in the villages we visited. Other events that have impacted me greatly include Capital One?s efforts on behalf of the South East Asian Quake relief fund and our Indian Ocean Tsunami relief fund, and our disaster relief efforts after Katrina.

As to where the CIO role goes... The use of IT is moving up the value chain and needs to be a part of "Business Design and Fulfillment" rather than "IT". This means that Operations and Technology groups are going to merge more. In addition, the e-commerce and customer interactions are so technology enabled now that they too need to be closely linked with IT strategy and process design. To this end, the new CIO role here will incorporate Enterprise Customer Management (all customer touch points and data), management of all Internet activities, Enterprise Process Engineering as well as all typical CIO functions."