"There is a major, major, major gap right now. Every year, year after year, the universities and colleges are graduating computer science majors in the thousands if not hundreds of thousands and these people know their way around computers and languages and technical this and technical that, and don't have the first clue about how to manage the IT program in a business. You know, things like: What are the top five or six macro processes that are present in every IT organization from small to large? And how would you organize an IT function, and what are the different models and when would you apply them, how would you apply them? Some of it may have been covered in an 'academic' sense, but 'academic' would be it.

"Whereas this new phenomenon - the BTM Institute - has perfected, if you will, a standard that has been assembled by this astonishing group of people. You have to look at this list on the Web site - it will just knock you over. It is these people who have worked together and met together over the last couple of years and put all of this together and said: This is what we should be teaching our students in association with a computer science degree because it gives the other half of the equation and prepares them for becoming the next generation of leaders of IT functions.

"Essentially in that sense the quantum leap is that we are about to enter the era where we can actually grow the next generation of IT leaders and CIOs, whereas to date we haven't grown them, they've grown themselves.

"I've grown myself, you know. Every CIO has come up a different way with a different background and without any true basis in common (at least that's written down anyway and been taught) and it has been kind of the school of hard knocks in the main. Whereas we're on the cusp now, with the major universities having adopted this BTM approach, where the graduating students will understand about governance and understand about organizational dynamics, and so on. I think that's very exciting."

Once all that is in place, Trainer would suggest, expect to see far fewer businesses and IT shops falling over their own feet.

SIDEBAR: Taking the Pepsi Challenge

In his 36-year career Tom Trainer, PepsiCo senior vice president and global CIO based out of Dallas, has completed major IT transformations for Eli Lilly and Company, Reebok International, and Joseph E Seagram and Sons, and might have done the same for Citigroup had not internal politics got in the way.

Trainer says all four organizations shared common factors with PepsiCo: "already successful, a great desire by the board and the senior executives to be even more successful via some kind of transformation or repositioning of the company, a realization that they had not spent much on IT for many years, and they somehow as a group realized truly that they could not get there from here unless IT was in the critical path. And it was going to cost a lot of money and a lot of transformation so that things could be properly enabled".

He also considers it critical that he joined each organization as an employee, not a consultant. That is, he says, "as the senior IT person in their world, and typically reporting to the president or the CEO of the company - that proper positioning, so to speak, at the table for IT".

"I saw my role as CIO as to achieve or help achieve success at the top level for the IT function and to give the company more value for their money than they expected, in the process convincing the IT people whom I inherited that there was something big in it for them individually and collectively if they would buy into my program. I delivered that each time. I also needed to get buy in to the fact that since there was typically an injection of leading edge technology and systems, which they [IT staff] did not have experience with, they had then to tolerate an infusion of typically senior IT executives who would lead them because they had 'been there and done that'.

"So that's one [role]. The second one is to distinctively play a role as one of the senior executives of those companies, not just the IT guy catching the IT ball in conversations in the executive committee. Just as the senior marketing person, senior finance person, senior sales person, senior manufacturing person absolutely weighed in on business strategy conversations or business tactical conversations, they [the board and senior executives] expected me to dive in and give my opinions too. It would not have been satisfactory if I just deferred to them and sat there waiting for something that sounded like IT to pop up."

Now Trainer is midway through transforming IT at PepsiCo into a world-class organization while enabling a Business Transformation/Process Harmonization initiative globally. Responsible for all technology decisions and operations, he leads the company's 2300-member strong IT organization, PepsiCo Business Solutions Group (PBSG). A major part of his role is to collaborate with PepsiCo's division leaders to drive business growth and competitive advantage by leveraging information technology across the company.

Trainer has been InformationWeek's CIO of the Year for his IT stewardship of Reebok's global business process redesign and was termed the "Quintessential CIO" by CIO (US) magazine for his vision and leadership. He lectures internationally on business and technology issues and has been a select member of specialized government task forces such as the President's Council for "United States Strategic Infrastructure in 21st Century" and the Institute for Strategic International Studies.

In addition, he is an enthusiastic member of the Business Technology Management Institute (BTM Institute), whose approach to governance has been widely adopted in business school curricula in different continents (the London School of Economics, for one, Trainer says) and has become a de facto standard.