Today's successful CIO must be single-mindedly driven to use technology to make their business more successful.

As critical as it may be to prepare for the future, you must still face the challenges of today on today's terms with today's available resources. As you cast your gaze to the horison, you cannot forget that you still compete in the here and now.

Organisations that have been around for a while tend to build up a certain amount of baggage. Organisational baggage isolates lines of business from one another and separates the planners from the doers. Technology baggage prevents one application from communicating effectively and deeply with another, and it traps valuable business logic in isolated corners of the business. Psychological baggage keeps us from realising that these examples are actually two sides of the same coin.

Today, you are still very much at the point of being able to capture huge amounts of value and productivity through fairly basic action. But you must address business fundamentals such as examining your business models and reflecting upon your willingness to loosen your grip on declining marketplaces in favor of today's opportunities. You must address technology fundamentals such as unlocking the wealth of function buried in siloed mainframe-based systems so that you can reuse that information across the organisation. You must address reliability fundamentals such as ensuring that an always-on connectivity infrastructure is in place to support the mission-critical systems that would paralyze the business if they failed. And you must address cultural fundamentals such as recognising the recurring gap between charting the right course for the business and actually bringing the business to that desired destination.

CIOs must analyse their IT business in much the same way a CEO or CFO might analyse the business of the overall organisation.

As the global marketplace becomes increasingly competitive, CEOs today are placing a high degree of importance on business and technology integration. Nearly 80 percent of the CEOs interviewed in IBM's Global CEO Study rated business and technology integration as of “great importance.” However, there is a significant gap between their desired levels of integration and the extent of the integration they've actually achieved. Many feel that the current level of alignment between business and IT is inadequate in their enterprise, and they find this to be a real source of frustration. As a result, these CEOs are looking to their CIOs to become collaborative business partners, and this means those CIOs need to think in business terms.

Integrating IT strategy with overall business goals has, therefore, become a key CIO priority. In addition to the external customers, other organisations within the enterprise are now seen as customers of the IT department. This unfolding new perspective means that CIOs must also analyse their IT business in much the same way a CEO or CFO might analyse the business of the overall organisation.

Building on a technique developed to help executive teams model their businesses in terms of key components, IBM has created the IBM Component Business Model™ for the Business of IT (CBM-BoIT) framework. CBM-BoIT is designed to help CIOs and their teams take a business-oriented, strategic approach to IT. The component modeling approach helps executives identify priorities for innovation and investment by breaking their IT organisations down into functional areas, or components. These components can be assessed for strategic differentiation and effectiveness, and mapped against spending and staffing data, in order to identify strategic priorities. The technique draws on years of IBM business and technology consulting expertise. This executive brief explores the CBM-BoIT framework, the Business of IT Executive Workshop, and their value to executive leaders of IT.