Within his own team he was keenly aware of the difficulties of sharing too much information. "Also specific to the CIO are the Chinese walls that need to be created, both inter- and intra-company," Roscarel explains. "You are trusted with a plethora of private information, such as strategy and commercial information, and you need to be very careful who you can or can't tell. That is a big driver for loneliness.

Roscarel sees the CIO wedged between the archetypal rock and hard place: Tell the team what you know and you compromise the relationship with senior management that trusted you with the information. Tell the senior management what your team is saying and you damage the relationship with the team. "That takes 90 percent of the social space away," Roscarel says.

Compounding the isolation, according to Roscarel, is the tendency of people within the business to treat the CIO as some sort of technological high priest. "Everyone talks to you as if you are an oracle. It's like you are sitting on top of the mountain cross-legged, saying 'What news from the south?'"

Isolation no longer comes with the territory for Roscarel. As the deputy executive director of the CIO Executive Council, he regularly interacts with other CIOs at a number of levels, from individually to various committee meetings and larger networking events. "While the council charter is clearly about CIO advocacy, and that's where we invest the bulk of our efforts, it's also a bit of a safe haven where we can openly discuss the issues CIOs deal with day in, day out - and loneliness is one of them. Whenever it's broached, there are always more heads nodding in agreement than not," Roscarel says.

More than ever, the CIO is one of the "suits", he says. "It's a many-sided position requiring an assortment of skills. You've got to be a bit of a guide, a bit of an evangelist and even a counsellor at times. And, yes, the job can also be lonely. But I don't think any CIO would say it's always lonely at the top. I think it's more the occasion of loneliness.

"There are a multitude of forces both within and without that are changing the way organizations view - and deal with - technology today. Take outsourcing for example. It's not a model I'm personally fond of, except for something basic like the desktop, but there are CIOs out there who are being pressured for financial reasons to go down that path and it can be a very lonely time. You've got relationships with your team, a team that has worked hard and invested huge amounts of integrity into the systems, and now you're considering cutting them loose or hiving them off to another employer.

"Another instance is when a project starts heading south you can feel very much alone. Sure everyone talks about business sponsors being critical to a project's success but not every sponsor walks the talk, and then all fingers point to IT. It seems like the mantra 'there are no IT projects, only business projects' has a short shelf-life when things go wobbly and at that point it becomes solely an IT project."

Technology has been demystified to a large extent, but it hasn't made the CIO's role easier Roscarel points out. If anything, IT's pervasiveness has led to an interesting consequence, one that he says makes it more difficult to impress upon the rest of the executive team the importance of aligning IT projects with the business.

"IT has become the object of simplistic observations," Roscarel says. "In other words, everybody thinks it's easy. Because everybody can run down to Harvey Norman and pick up a PC and go home and turn it on, it's hard for them to understand why there's so much cost and so much complexity in implementing a business information system. It can be a very difficult role, and the degree of difficulty is related to how diverse the business is. What you often find in trying to come to a solution that's for the greater good, you're not always optimizing the individual pieces, which is a difficult position to be in sometimes.

"All of these things - and basically I'm talking the tip of the iceberg here - can leave you with a sense of 'aloneness'. Now you're frustrated because internally where are you going to let off steam or get advice? People either don't understand the particular issues or are dealing with their own. And you certainly don't want to take it home.

"What I'm hearing from Executive Council members is sure the advocacy stuff is great, the knowledge database is great, the ability to tap expertise globally is great, but the unanticipated plus is that there are people, and these are your peers, who understand what's happening and have probably been there and dealt with the same situation."

Keep it at the Office

Former CIO Gillies thinks that in general it is best not to take too much home in any case. "The thing is to separate work and personal life because you can get to a senior position and take yourself so damn seriously that you eat, drink and sleep it. Then you can get lonely because home treats you like an alien too.

"That happened to me, but luckily I have kids to say: 'Get over it; don't develop too much of an ego'." That is particularly important, she says, when accepting a new assignment. "If you are finding it too hard, and sometimes we get promoted when we are only just ready for the job, the first six months can be hell. You are afraid to let your team know, and you really don't want to let the executive team know."