It's a discussion suited to a late night with friends and a few glasses of beer: How do you become a more effective person? It's also the stuff of popular culture: There's a "secret" to personal effectiveness, and/or it's the result of seven particular habits.

InformationWeek was interested in finding out the characteristics, personal traits, technology skills, and business acumen that make for a highly effective individual in one of the most demanding jobs in today's corporate environment: the CIO. To try and get an accurate picture of CIO effectiveness, InformationWeek queried more than 700 business executives, not only CIOs and VPs of IT but also IT managers and staff, senior corporate managers (CXOs such as CEOs, CFOs, and COOs), and line-of-business managers. InformationWeek asked effectiveness questions about CIOs in general and about the respondents' CIOs in particular--which, of course, included the 180 CIO respondents who were essentially evaluating themselves.

The intent was to provide a complete picture of what makes for a highly functioning CIO. The result was a mixed review: some A's, a few C's, and some significant check marks under "needs improvement."

ALIGNMENT ÜBER ALLES

Far and away, the characteristic most identified with an effective CIO is that person's ability "to support company-wide business strategy." Seventy percent of IT chiefs agree on that, as do more than three-quarters of CXOs and almost two-thirds of line-of-business managers (see chart, right). The next two most important characteristics for CIO effectiveness are the ability to understand both business process and technology, and the ability to drive innovation. That's in line with what most observers see as the emerging role of the CIO: a strategist well versed in the processes encapsulated in a company's software applications and able to envision, articulate, and help implement business process change.

Unfortunately, fiscal responsibility was the effective characteristic most respondents associated with their current chief tech execs. While being good with a dollar is a nice compliment, it's hardly a ringing endorsement for that person as a business strategist or an agent of change.

Fortunately, the ability to support business strategy is a characteristic of a significant number of CIOs, according to 59% of their CXOs (see chart, p. CIO4). And almost half of those executives believe their CIOs have the ability to drive innovation. That should be an important signal to CIOs not similarly thought of: If you're not in lockstep with business strategy, you aren't driving business innovation, and your most recognizable characteristic is money management, then maybe your CEO is envisioning someone more effective for your position.

The priority of aligning technology initiatives with business strategy appears several times in the survey. When asked which tech skills are most important to an effective CIO, business and technology alignment scores highest, with almost three-quarters of CXOs and 81% of CIOs agreeing (see chart, left). When asked what skill is the most essential to develop over the next 12 months, the ability to support company-wide business strategy was tops again.

That alignment imperative is good and bad. Business-technology alignment has been a goal of tech managers for almost as long as the position has been in existence. It has scored in the list of top 10 management concerns in the Society for Information Management's annual survey for 27 straight years and was No. 1 from 2003 to 2006, edged out this year only by "attracting, developing, and retaining IT professionals." It speaks to the primary importance of technology in conducting business today that all parts of the organization acknowledge the need to match up IT initiatives with business strategy.

On the other hand, "alignment is one-sided," says M.S. Krishnan, a professor of business information technology at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business. Alignment is more closely associated with "order-taking," IT's old-line identity as a passive participant in business operations, he says, than with its modern-day embodiment as an agent of business process change. Krishnan prefers the expression "synchronization," as in business strategy and tech projects should be synchronized to achieve maximum impact on the company's business model.