What is happening in front of me?

In the past I talked about the increased power of the CIO within the energy world. In these conversations, I tended to speak about the CIO's role in a somewhat hedged fashion alluding to his increased power within the enterprise - but not correctly identifying the underlying shift. Previously, general IT seems to have been an outsourced function whereby the systems integrators took on the role as shepherd/advisor within the IT stack.

For a time, it seemed that market was increasing its reliance on the system integrators by adopting SAP. Outsourcing was increasing. For a time, this was true. However, I believe that the adoption of SAP really planted the seeds of change in the energy industry. The level of sophistication and talent to manage and supplement these systems increased. And so the industry appears to be hiring internally the sophistication and talent to do these things. So what do I think is happening in front of me?....I think the industry is transitioning from an IT outsource model to an insource model....the industry is INSOURCING.

This means that turnover of intellectual capital will be lower and that IT will think more proactively than reactively. IT will thus start to take on a different life and meaning within the organization. I think this means good things for investing in application companies that serve the energy industry.