Of the sessions I was able to attend, the boldest one was the MIT academic panel, followed by an after lunch free-for-all on big data and analytics that was anything but a siesta. (Look for a piece soon on why CIOs might want to run away from big data.) The three MIT academicians who gave their take on the untethered enterprise are professors, but not exactly of the Mr. Chips variety — beacons of calm in the midst of unimaginable change. They were more like bomb -throwers, invoking all the forces — consumerization of IT, cloud, crowdsourcing, social networking, the voice of the customer, — that are blowing up the enterprise as we know it. In this brave new enterprise, agility trumps strategy and resilience trumps strength. Today, customers should be serving the company (think Facebook’s 800 million users generating content).

I was entranced. As I wrote in my CIO Matters column this week, however, I was also leery of — OK, confused by — how all this will impact the CIO’s role. There was some talk about how pruning and curating will be important as companies try out new things willy willy-nilly, so maybe the CIO role will be defined as master gardener. One of the profs mentioned a childhood friend now at eBay who does nothing but figure out the “checks and balances” between buyers and sellers. So maybe the CIO’s role will be akin to Founding Father. As someone who has done my fair share of time in the kitchen, I would only urge CIOs that the one metaphor you don’t want to embrace in this latest computing revolution is doing the dishes. Check out the column and you’ll understand.

Called customer crowdsourcing by some, the idea is to get customers involved in the product and services design process. Now, this is nothing new for software vendors. Customers are often involved in the development and patch cycles, especially in these days of frequent Software as a Service release cycles. What I haven’t heard of as much, until recently, is a push by businesses outside the technology area to involve customers in product design and conceptualization. Talk about having the inside scoop! These customers are being treated almost as extensions of the product maker’s workforce.

Harvey Koeppel, executive director of the Center for CIO Leadership in New York, brought the subject up recently during a call with SearchCIO.com. The center taps its 2,100 members to conduct research on the latest permutations of the CIO role and technology trends. He said that customer crowdsourcing is a “hot topic” among his members, and one that we will surely be hearing more about from CIOs.

So I asked the very next CIO I talked to, Frank Wander, CIO of Guardian Life Insurance Company of America. And sure enough, Frank said that Guardian was hip to crowdsourcing — actually for some time now. While the company is not using a crowdsourcing platform or system to collect data, he told me that gathering input from customers has been part of Guardian’s product development process for years.

“Through sales, we’re always hearing what the customers are asking for,” and those ideas are incorporated in the development process, he said.

I’m wondering just how involved customers are becoming in the product design process — outside of software development. There are crowdsourcing vendors that will connect you with thousands of potential customers online for new ideas. But will we soon see a crop of crowdsourcing platforms that automate the collection of your own customers’ ideas?

It’s already interesting to watch the effects that the consumerization of IT is having on the way technology is now delivered to employees. Perhaps customer crowdsourcing will fundamentally change the way companies develop new products. If anything, it’s another opportunity for CIOs to foster and automate such a process, and directly contribute to the company’s bottom line.

Let us know what you think about this blog post; email Christina Torode, News Director.