At a recent Gartner Executive Programs Forum in Brisbane, several CIOs were discussing the challenge of demonstrating ongoing business benefits from IT-intensive projects with one of our analysts, Dave Aron.

When companies decide to swap out an on-premise enterprise software system for vendor-hosted SaaS applications, IT staffers often worry about what this change means for their jobs and their roles in the IT department.

It’s the bête noire of C-level managers the world over — too often, it’s easy to be pulled into the morass of day-to-day issues at the expense of strategy. If the role is predominantly operational, fair enough, but being forced into operations when you were hired to be strategic (or vice versa) is frustrating for everybody involved. So how do CIOs balance operations and strategy? Aligning the departmental business plan with the organisation’s strategic plan is an obvious starting point. Beyond that, however, CIOs have developed their own methods of staying strategic.

The thrill of booting up a team never gets old for Steve Finnerty, Applied Materials' vice president of IT and vendor services and a mentor in the CIO Executive Council's Pathways leadership development program. Good thing. The 40-year IT veteran and former CIO for Kraft Foods, Johnson Controls and JM Huber has headed up no fewer than three big new teams in as many years since joining Applied Materials, the world's largest supplier of manufacturing equipment to the semiconductor, display and solar photovoltaic industries.

Most people think of Peter Drucker as a business visionary, and for good reason. Drucker, whose 100th birthday is being celebrated posthumously this month, was a renowned management professor and consultant, retained by some of the biggest and most powerful companies, including General Electric, Procter & Gamble and IBM. He was also a prolific writer, having published 39 books on management and penned a column for The Wall Street Journal for 20 years, in addition to writing for Forbes, Fortune, The Atlantic and other leading publications.

Jock? Geek? Artist? Underachiever? Do our high school selves predict our career paths?