Leader: Future IT department, future CIO

This week, two types of story in this publication give us a pretty good idea where IT, the IT department and the people that head IT departments are going.

We have heard separately about the mega pay cheques of two CIOs. Buried in their respective results statements, the Royal Mail has paid CIO David Burden more than £1m for the past 12 months. This still public institution has started to turn around its business, it seems.

Twenty-four hours later and it is giant retailer Tesco - long known for its momentum - that tells us its international operations and IT director, Philip Clarke, has bagged almost £1.8m.

Big sums - we can almost feel comparisons with where you work going on right this second - and let's return to the how and why in a moment.

Alongside all this, we have heard our panel of heads of IT - our CIO Jury - telling us, by a ratio of two to one, that the IT department won't exist in its present form by 2010.

Many of those who took part in our latest debate and answered 'yes' - saying the corporate IT department will still be with us in five years' time - were guarded. Well-known heads of IT as diverse as Richard Steel at London Borough of Newham and Ian Auger at ITN told us it is still a question of how much change and evolution there will be.

Those in the 'no' camp, the majority, commonly spoke about outsourcing and managing relationships.

And arguably this is where we return to the first part of this article. For those who would question an IT boss earning the big bucks, let us consider it this way: both Burden and Clarke sit on the boards of their respective organisations. They are well-respected business leaders, not just 'the IT guy', though they can hardly be technophobes.

When looked at in this light, it isn't so surprising they earn the money they do. Of course anyone can still start a debate about whether executives in general are overpaid or whether strategies such as outsourcing or 'open sourcing' - a phrase used by CIO JP Rangaswami at investment bank DrKW - generate long-term success.