If it does disappear, that will be a problem, because it's the chief information officer who is best placed to use technology to change business and break down internal organizational barriers.

These and other thought-provoking ideas about the future of IT came from Forrester Research at its CIO Forum held in London this week.

"CIOs are in a unique and potentially powerful position for business transformation," VP and principal analyst Marc Cecere told European IT leaders. "After the strategy phase, 80% of the work and activity falls under the role of the CIO, so a strong role for a CIO is a given."

But, he cautioned, the CIO needs to "to understand their base of power." By that, Cecere seemed to mean that CIOs need to know how they are perceived by their company -- as an order-taker (a "soldier") or as a more dynamic transformation agent -- and act accordingly.

In today's increasingly wired -- and wireless -- world, however, the surveillance situation is much more banal: Under the NSA's Prism program, APIs installed on servers running at Google, Facebook, Microsoft and other technology giants give government spooks access to meta-data relating to communications and phone calls. It is signals intelligence meets big data and analytics, with a self-writing sales pitch that seems tailor-made for the Big Three: "Mass surveillance to monitor for suspected terrorists across the entire United States, for only $20 million." Data storage, no doubt, costs extra.

But the biggest problem with the NSA's program is that it has all the hallmarks of an "engineering first" mindset, along these lines: With all of that metadata floating in the ether, why not build it and see what secrets it might reveal? The same philosophy appeared to be behind Google's Street View program, in which a "rogue engineer" pursued wardriving by design, capturing Wi-Fi data for later analysis. Numerous governments fined Google for privacy violations.

The enterprise-owned glass house is alive and well: Our survey shows just 4% of respondents aggressively moving applications to the public cloud, and another 4% of survey respondents expect demand for data center resources to decrease, compared with 69% expecting increases. Many are girding for upticks of 25% or more. At that pace, enterprises can't further virtualize or build new facilities fast enough to keep up, even if they could afford to -- which many can't, given that spending on data center facilities and associated infrastructure is little changed year over year.

After you've consolidated existing facilities and servers to the limit, what then?

To get more done with the same physical resources and people, CIOs might look to such cutting-edge technologies as self-service private clouds; software-defined networks and storage; and high-density, low-power servers. They can off-load commodity IT services such as email, unstructured data backup and public-facing websites to public cloud and software-as-a-service providers. But is that enough, given how fast demand for application resources, storage, network capacity and services is rising?

"We have mountains of data, if we wanted to accuse the U.S., but it's not helpful in solving the problem," Huang Chengqing, the director of the National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team Coordination Center of China (CNCERT), told government-run media outlet China Daily Wednesday.

According to data published by CNCERT, in the first three months of 2013, 5.6 million systems in China were infected by malware tied to 13,400 command-and-control servers located overseas. Of those, more than half of infected systems -- 2.9 million PCs -- were controlled by about 4,000 command-and-control servers based in the United States. Meanwhile, 3,500 U.S. systems had been used to take over about 7,700 different websites located in China.

In the same timeframe, CNCERT reported that 54 U.S.-based IP addresses had "hijacked Chinese official websites to steal data," which according to China Daily included sites related to "government departments, key information systems and research institutions."

That gloves-off approach is just one of many recommendations for combating industrial espionage outlined in a new report from the Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property, which is headed by the former director of national intelligence, Dennis Blair, as well as Jon Huntsman, who's served as the governor of Utah as well as U.S. ambassador to China.

"China is two-thirds of the intellectual property theft problem, and we are at a point where it is robbing us of innovation to bolster their own industry, at a cost of millions of jobs," Huntsman told The New York Times. "We need some realistic policy options that create a real cost for this activity because the Chinese leadership is sensitive to those costs."

The report offers 21 specific recommendations, including increasing the budget of the FBI and Department of Justice to investigate trade theft and amending U.S. counter-espionage laws to allow businesses that suffer intellectual property (IP) theft to sue foreign organizations for damages. It also advocates longer-term measures, such as rating countries on their ability to protect IP, as well as ensuring that U.S. officials "push to move China, in particular, beyond a policy of indigenous innovation toward becoming a self-innovating economy."

That trend continued Wednesday at the Citrix Synergy conference in Anaheim, where Dell announced a range of cloud computing products for Citrix-based environments, including options that support Citrix XenDesktop 7, also unveiled on Wednesday. Dell hopes the moves will diversify its revenue streams, which are currently reliant on its low-margin PC business.

The announcements include a version of Dell's Active System 800 converged infrastructure line optimized for Citrix XenDesktop. The product is a pre-integrated system that fits server, storage and networking into a modest footprint. It includes Active System Manager, which facilitates single pane management of both physical and virtual assets.

Dell is also offering two reference architectures that add additional features to the Active System 800 configuration. One supports NVIDIA's GRID and targets users whose virtualized graphics needs are particularly demanding, and the other includes a local storage option that Dell says will drive down costs by eliminating the need for SAN.