This is a fascinating but also precarious time to be a CIO, particularly one with global responsibilities. CIOs are being given more strategic roles than ever before, yet they're simultaneously seeing their budgets cut while expectations remain unrelenting, and of course the global recession only complicates the situation. CIOs are being asked to drive business change while at the same time many are trying to replace old and inflexible infrastructures with modern and flexible ones. They're being given responsibility for establishing global standards in applications and related processes, but sometimes without the organizational authority to enforce those new standards. And across the globe, CIOs are fighting the stubborn perception that IT in general and CIOs and their teams in particular are cost centers rather than creators of value and accelerators of innovation.

In this best-of-times, worst-of-times scenario, CIOs can find enormous value in seeing how their peers around the world are dealing with these difficult and urgent imperatives. So InformationWeek's Global CIO has developed a couple of projects to give you some of that global peer-level perspective:

• In the Global CIO 50, we've identified 50 of the top CIOs from around the world and profiled them and the strategic contributions they're making to their companies. We selected CIOs and their companies based on market leadership, innovative IT-enabled business practices and results, and the achievement and impact of the individual CIOs.

• The Global CIO research report, "Small World, Big Opportunities," is based on an exclusive, primary-research survey conducted across multiple countries to determine top priorities, approaches, and attitudes for CIOs around the world. We received more than 2,000 completed surveys, but because we wanted to focus on CIO-level reactions, we culled the 861 responses from CIOs and VPs of IT and built our study on their input. The entire study is available for sale here.

Read all 50 Global CIO profiles

Study The Research
Our exclusive report, based on surveys with 861 senior IT executives, is available for purchase.

Network With Global Peers
Our July 29 virtual event provides a unique, free forum to hear from global IT leaders and interact online with peers around the world. Speakers include GM's Ralph Szygenda, Aviva's Toby Redshaw, Cardinal Health's Jody Davids, and more.

Among the key findings from our Global CIO best practices report are the three top priorities cited by CIOs from around the globe: working to spend less money on internal IT issues and more on external, customer-facing projects (our old friend, the 80/20 ratio); developing and refining new ways to capture and communicate the business value of IT efforts and expenses on global projects; and shifting the internal outlooks of worldwide IT organizations to reflect global perspectives rather than domestic ones.

And you'll see those themes reflected in the achievements of the Global CIO 50: UPS CIO Dave Barnes noting that UPS aircraft now fly more miles outside the continental United States than inside; Coca-Cola, recognizing China as its third-largest and perhaps fastest-growing global market, opening a $90 million innovation and technology center in Shanghai; LG Electronics CIO Kim Tae Keuk leading an effort to replace more than 80 different ERP systems around the world with a single, global system capturing 440 business processes; and more.

So please come meet the Global CIO 50. While it's up to you to act locally, we hope this package helps you think globally.

CIO profiles from India and Brazil were written by Network Computing India and InformationWeek Brasil, InformationWeek sister publications.