Stories by: Abbie Lundberg

As long as there have been CIOs, there have been people claiming that IT executives get fired a lot more than any of their C level colleagues. In the early '90s, some sharp-witted observer quipped that CIO was coming to stand for "Career Is Over." Conventional wisdom held that the average tenure of a CIO was 2.5 years (it seems that Paul Strassmann may have been the originator of this data point); in fact, as little as a few years ago people were still citing that number, which hadn't been true since at least the mid-90s - if it ever was true at all. It began to feel like some overworked Rodney Dangerfield skit.

It's conventional wisdom that big organizations aren't as innovative as smaller ones. At best, innovation is harder for them. At worst, big companies crush innovation before it has time to interfere with the status quo. But conventional wisdom is rarely reliable, and certainly never 100 per cent.

If there's anyone under 30 working in your company, you've got Digital Natives. Marc Prensky coined this term in 2001, in a paper titled, "Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants." His starting point: "today's students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach." Things need to change, and they need to change fast. Since 2001, many of those students have graduated, and they're working for you.

Executives who want to understand the value of social networking or other Web 2.0 technologies should just get out there and try it.

Business technology leaders should be all over social networking as a means of creating real value from the intellectual assets of the enterprise. The biggest barriers aren't technical or even organizational - they're cultural.

Ask the average manager or executive if they'd welcome Facebook into the workplace, and they'll say, "Are you nuts?!" But Serena Software got some press last month when it declared Facebook Fridays. The company's 800 employees in 18 countries were encouraged to spend one hour each Friday on their Facebook profiles, connecting with co-workers, customers, family and friends.

For a long time, it's really slayed me when people talk about IT operational excellence being "table stakes." It always sounded so dismissive. I think of that little white chip you throw in on every hand of poker. It's a nothing. Anyone can come up with it.

I'm beginning a new venture today - a blog. It's not that I've never posted anything before, but those sporadic posts were the equivalent of me standing on the bank of the river, tossing a few sticks into the current to see where they'd end up - if they'd get swept into the main flow or snag on the rest of the flotsam cluttering up the stream. I didn't care a whole lot about the fate of the sticks. This has been a completely insufficient way to become part of the many interesting conversations taking place - about stuff I care a lot about -- or to learn how communication itself is changing. So I figure I'd better just go ahead and commit to full-body immersion, even though I'm not exactly sure where I'll end up or what lies beneath.

In the past six years, Kevin Turner has occupied three of the most senior offices in the corporate C-suite: CIO, CEO and COO. He talks about what's different and what's the same, and shares the secrets of his success

Author Nicholas Carr and CIO (US) editor in chief Abbie Lundberg go toe-to-toe on the strategic value of IT