One of the great joys I have in serving the CIO community is witnessing the openness and transparency you have with each other-especially when given the chance to sit down face-to-face at one of our events. Whether the perspectives you share come from your experience with business, technology or overall leadership, I'm always impressed by how generous IT executives are in exchanging invaluable insights and guidance that ultimately improves everyone's performance.

It is amazing to me how much we talk about business process when in reality we understand very little about it.

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.