CIO: And COOs? Is there a common theme to their questions?

Michael Fleisher: COOs are an interesting breed. They tend to look at the world through the eyes of business unit executives. And business unit executives are all focused on finding interesting technology that can help change the competitive landscape of their business: "Help me understand this interesting thing that is happening out there in the industry." Six to eight months ago, we launched a new research service specifically aimed at those people, to talk about the application of technology. Our technologist clients would probably consider it lightweight, but it's really to help some of those business unit people - COOs, presidents and people of that nature - to think about the application of technology in business. They can look at how people in the pharmaceutical industry are using technology to change their competitive landscape, or how people in financial services are using it. Hopefully, they learn from that and get ideas that will spark things in their own industry.

CIO: Speaking of business units, in recent years a lot of CIOs were told: "We'll give you a budget for Â'keeping the lights on'," but big chunks of the IT budget were pushed out to the business unit managers. Now I'm seeing a move back to centralisation . . .

Michael Fleisher: I think CEOs woke up and said: "I've gotten burned by a lot of investments that never paid off." A lot of these investments were marketing- or business unit-driven. They were very client facing and used a lot of whiz-bang, untested technologies. A lot of them were market-share grabs. I think people are looking at that and saying: "Just like I entrust someone who runs human resources to manage my people asset, just like I entrust somebody who's a CFO to run my capital assets, just like I entrust somebody in manufacturing to run my manufacturing assets, I need to entrust the CIO to manage our technology assets."

That doesn't mean they own and control every dollar of it. CIOs still have to work with the business units, just like those other functions do, but CEOs need to have someone who manages that asset of the company. And I think CEOs have to have a clear understanding that you need a smart, thoughtful business-technology person to do that as your CIO.

CIO: Okay - you've just sort of described the "perfect" CIO; but I believe there's this perhaps harmful cookie-cutter mentality when it comes to CIOs. Observers quite happily describe different types of CEOs - the entrepreneur, the caretaker, the innovator - and acknowledge that organisations need these different types of CEOs as they go through different business cycles. Whereas, when it comes to CIOs, there's this kind of sense of: "CIOs? Well, they're all pretty much cut from the same cloth."

As we see business dynamics changing - the need for more transparency, more governance, more focus on competitiveness and the customer - do you think that organisations will deliberately seek CIOs with distinctive styles and traits?

Michael Fleisher: I think that we are already seeing the emergence of various types of CIOs. In part this is dependent on industry. There are clearly some CIOs that are more industry specialised. I also think we are seeing CIOs who are appropriate for different stages of the business. We're seeing "turnaround" or "take-over" CIOs - people who know how to come in, quickly assess a situation and make stuff work. We're seeing more entrepreneurial, future thinking CIOs in businesses where technology leads the strategy of the business. In that instance, you need a CIO who thinks about the next generation, not just keeping the lights on.

I think there are lots of different characteristics to look for in a CIO, and as a result the recruiting process and the hiring process for those people has gotten much more intense. I get lots of people who call me for references on CIOs. I think people are much more thoughtful now about what they want than they were five years ago, or even a year ago.

The largest dividing category is business-oriented CIO versus technology-oriented CIO. One isn't good and the other bad, they're just different. Some companies need a technology-oriented CIO, others need a business-oriented CIO. We have a greater demand today for business-oriented CIOs, and I would say that's the largest classification.