We don't normally critique CIOs because we have a healthy appreciation of the difficulty of their job. That being said, we believe that there are some fundamental changes that have to occur inside the majority of IT organizations and that won't happen unless there is active involvement of CIOs. Based on that belief, we are going to use the next couple of newsletters to present some recent market research into the role of the CIO and will use subsequent newsletters to talk about CIO priorities - what they are and what we think they should be.

As part of the market research, we surveyed 243 IT professionals and also interviewed three IT professionals: a CIO, a network tools architect and a manager of enterprise networks. The interviewees will be referred to in the newsletters by their titles.

We asked the survey respondents if they think their CIO is an innovative, strategic thinker who is closely aligned with their company’s senior business and functional managers. More than half agreed either moderately or strongly with that statement. Only about 11% of the respondents disagreed.

We then explored the topic of IT alignment with the CIO. The CIO we interviewed stated that his IT organization was very well aligned with the company’s business and functional managers, but that this alignment was the result of a lot of hard work. He pointed out that one of the ways that his team developed better links with the company’s business managers was to adopt an organizational model that was similar to that of the business. In particular, the CIO's company is a fairly decentralized organization and he started at the company four years ago he appointed CIOs for each of the business units. While these business unit CIOs report to the CIO, they function as if they report to the head of the business unit.

Another initiative that the CIO credits with improving the alignment of IT with the business managers is that where appropriate they have implemented common technology. For example, the CIO stated that they have a highly standardized desktop which allows them to both cut cost and to improve quality metrics as there are fewer technologies to support. The CIO did add that they do have an exception process to deal with situations in which the standardized solution does not meet the business need.

Steve Taylor is president of Distributed Networking Associates and publisher/editor-in-chief of Webtorials. Jim Metzler is vice president of Ashton, Metzler & Associates.