Double Duty

Added job titles bring more practical benefits to go along with prestige: CIOs holding other titles are among the highest-paid IT executives. A study by the IT research firm Alinean shows that at least 13 of these CIOs received compensation packages of $1 million or more last year.

Compensation notwithstanding, these executives pride themselves on being able to merge multiple tasks with business technology at their core. "I've always viewed myself as a businessperson first and a technologist second," Shack says. "The goal is to use technology to serve the businesses, not the other way around."

-- with Paul Travis