How Are You With the "R" Word?

Our current slate of lead feature stories all deal with the CIO's relationships and changing roles within the broader organization. We all know those relationships have been, how should we say, tested recently.The push for better governance and transparency, necessitated by a growing list of regulations, has created new problems that can only be addressed with a huge assist from IT. In fact, when IT organizations get involved, they're finding new problems that no one knew existed. In the past this might have been more like a thorn than a rose to the CEO and CFO, but these days, it's their butts that are saved when the problems get fixed.

Still, CIOs are from Mars and CEOs are from Venus. And managing those differences are essential for the success of any IT organization. To find out how some CIOs get on the wrong foot and also read some profiles in success, check out the in-depth article from Optimize, What Your CEO Wants You To Know.

And then there's the relationship between the CIO and the CFO. In many healthy organizations, the friction between these two officers can be near lethal. But we're happy to report that new compliance agendas mean that they can't afford to kill each other. In fact, better collaboration has become the watchword since the need for better financial controls and the verification of those controls is now mandated by federal regulations.

To see how this close working relationship is evolving, check out Decoding The CIO-CFO Relationship, another insightful piece from Optimize.

And to hear it straight from the mouths of six CIOs as they discuss their new roles, don't miss Roundtable: The New CIO Leadership.

Does this mean that the collaboration required for compliance initiatives will put an end to internal turf wars? Probably not. There will always be finite resources and every manager wants his/her project on the front burner. But it will result in better processes and better information and, in the end, that is how a CIO defines success.