But listening as CEOs talk about their challenges and priorities reveals subtle but significant shifts in emphasis. Yes, CEOs are concerned about global competitiveness; yes, they want improved internal communications. However, they now are much more concerned about getting more value from their best people. They even seem more motivated to get better results from their "average" people. In short, CEOs seem both more nervous and more ambitious about getting greater returns from their firms' "human capital" portfolio. Augmenting human performance now appears even more important than automating business process.

But are executive teams following through on these priorities in truly meaningful ways? Comparing these stated priorities with what CEOs and CIOs actually spend their time and resources on reveals a disconnect.

For example, the CIO of a global bank set up a lovely technical infrastructure to support blogs and wikis worldwide. The professed goal was to make the firm's internal communications platform more vibrant, diverse and participatory. The bad news? The new blogosphere/wikisphere was built with the approval of - but with no guidance from - the CEO and the operating executive council. Yes, there are individuals - and individual departments and projects - taking healthy advantage of this resource. But, no, there is no integrated or coherent corporate understanding of how blogs and wikis should transform how people should communicate or collaborate within the firm.

Ironically, his C-level peers criticize the CIO for launching the platform before they were "ready" to take advantage of it. The CEO points to the platform as "yet another way our organization is empowering our people" without citing any best practice worthy of enterprise emulation. This is fake empowerment. Instead of exercising leadership by defining what kinds of benefits he expected to gain from these blogs and wikis, the CEO jumped on a fad and got wikis for the sake of wikis, which is rubbish. The CIO responded by saying: Sure, I can build that. They created capacity without understanding the underlying value.

It's time for a new kind of internal audit. CIOs have acquired great expertise in IT asset management and articulating how the firm gets good returns from its IT portfolio of software and systems. Systems to support the human capital portfolio demand comparable treatment from IT. CIOs need to push their people - and their C-level colleagues - to identify what the key elements are in the firm's professional development and talent management portfolio and match up the systems investments with the people ones.