CIO: The other thing I'm seeing - both here and in the US - is that there used to be a fair amount of debate regarding the CIO as a candidate for the CEO position. But there's a bit of a rethink going on. CIOs who aren't totally abandoning the idea of being a CEO, but are also now thinking that's not necessarily the only goal. They see their natural career path as a CIO who keeps moving to larger and larger and larger companies.

Michael Fleisher: First of all, I must say that having been the CEO of a public company for three years now, I have discovered that nobody wants to be a CEO of a public company. So the fact that CIOs are saying that they don't want to be CEOs any more doesn't surprise me in the least. Now that CEOs are regularly being handcuffed and carried off by the police, I think that has [curbed] the desire of a lot of people.

If we go back to our classifications, I do think there are some really business-oriented CIOs who see it [the CIO role] as a stepping-stone to becoming a business leader. They look at it and say: "Technology is so paramount to the strategic import of most companies going forward that if I can actually learn to manage this stuff, that's going to be a huge weapon for me." And so they take a stint away from the business to become a technology leader, with the intention that they will eventually go back in and lead a business unit later and get on the a path to be CEO.

I do think, however, that we are seeing clearer paths for CIOs who say: "I am a CIO at a smaller-scale company and I intend to move on to a larger-scale company. Sometimes this move occurs within the same industry; sometimes they jump industries, but [usually] it is a jump to a like industry. So I don't find that shocking or surprising, but I do find that as we see more business-oriented folks coming up from the business ranks and doing a stint as a CIO, you are going to see more of those folks on track to becoming CEOs.

CIO: I'd like to talk a little bit about the real-time enterprise. Great idea, but I couldn't help thinking that CIOs might be thinking: "I've just got to deal with the crap that is happening right now. Great concept, but I've got so many things that I'm pulling my hair out over - getting the back-office in shape, projects that are blowing out, shrinking budgets - and now this."

Michael Fleisher: Remember that our theme last year was the "gap" year, and that this was a year for people to catch their breath. The pressure is off a little bit, so let's figure out how to make something out of all of the money we've spent that's now in a series of disparate systems - unfortunately, many of them that touch the clients.

I don't think that goes away. Just because we stand up here and say "real-time enterprise" doesn't mean that tomorrow we should be focusing on the real-time enterprise. What it means is you need to start thinking about that concept because as the global economy starts to heat up again - that notion of time being the most valuable commodity and companies being successful using their knowledge of how much time it takes to do things to their competitive advantage - we think that's going to be a huge issue for people.

I don't think we are suggesting to folks that they run out tomorrow and do [the real-time enterprise]. What we are saying is: "Look, you have to keep the lights on. You have to take the broken things that are screwed up in your organisation and make them work better. But if you want to start thinking about it, this is one of those things that people should start thinking about." We see it as our [job], to help people think about what's out there on the horizon.

And by the way, we think this is a place where maybe for the first time CIOs can drive their fellow business executives in a business discussion about something. If I am a CIO today, I want to be sitting down at the business table with the CEO and I want to be saying: "Hey we need to start thinking about this [the real-time enterprise]. We don't need to do anything tomorrow. I'm not coming here to tell you I want to spend $100 million on technology for this. But as a business, how are we going to deal with the fact that having certain things happening in real time is going to be a much more meaningful to our business?"

I realise that this isn't all going to happen in three months or six months. So many projects and implementations have not succeeded. CRM seems to be the latest one that everybody wants to talk about. There is this "silver bullet" mentality. You can't make the enterprise customer-oriented just by putting CRM in. The culture has to be there, you have to know what you want. In other words, again, it's about managing the expectations of the business, and this really falls to the CIO.