Transparency was important in managing IT team politics, according to another CIO, who says that a clearly defined outcome helped stamp out any obfuscating political twittering along the way from the IT team. While he was willing to grant his IT team some liberty when it came to determining how to arrive at the prescribed outcome, he was less tolerant of any attempts to tinker with the outcome itself.

"If I've got tensions in the department, then I confront them, but not in a hostile way. I don't mind if two people don't get along, but I do mind if the outcomes are affected. Then they need to sort it out. One decision may mean that some people decide to leave, and that's fine too," he says.

One CIO recalls his first meeting with his IT team when he moved into the role as an external appointment. "They were all looking at me out of the corners of their eyes." After three days in the job he called a whole team meeting, prefacing it with the fact that anyone there could ask anything and it would stay in the meeting room. "I walked in and didn't know any of them. I said: 'We are all intelligent, so get over it'. I opened up and said: 'I'm vulnerable too but I'm your leader and I need you'.

"I got two questions and it's been great ever since," he adds.

It is a strategy other CIOs confirm. "Be honest, be trusted and form relationships. Weed out people in the organization that play bad politics. Only work in a place where people want you to be and you are supported at the highest level because that way you are less susceptible to destructive politics." This particular executive has not left a position because of politics in the past, but now says she would, because she has no longer the interest to play politics when the role demands. What are harder to escape she admits, are gender politics.

"I think being a woman brings more politics because you are facing not only the IT-business politics but the male-female politics. Often women don't have the ability to manage the male politics as we tend to do it intellectually rather than on a relationship basis that is comfortable with them. We don't do the sports, the beers, where a lot of trust is built.

"This may be an old fashioned way of doing business but it is still alive and well and will continue to be while the baby boomers are in charge," she adds.

A male CIO confirms that in many organizations IT is still viewed as a boys' club, and although he has no issues with women on his team, and would in fact like to find more, he can't. Today only 15 percent of Australia's 348,200 ICT employees are women — an 8 percent drop in the past year, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

Gender politics it seems may be the only breed of politics on the wane.