Many organizations are experiencing a crisis of confidence in their information systems and in the chief information officers who lead them. General managers are tired of being told that information technology can create competitive advantage and enable business transformation. What they observe and experience are IS project failures, unrelenting hype about IT, and rising information processing costs. Chief executive officers often do not know how to evaluate the performance of the IS function or the contribution of the CIO.

Consequently, radical IS management prescriptions, such as outsourcing and downsizing, are being applied, and CIOs are even being fired.¹ Some of them are the very heroes of the IT profession whose photographs graced the covers of business magazines not long ago.

For several years, we have been researching IS leaders, conducting extensive interviews with CEOs and CIOs.² One study examined the factors that determined the relationships between CEOs and CIOs in fourteen organizations.³ A second focused on the survival of CIOs, and studied ten matched pairs of "surviving" and "nonsurviving" CIOs in different industries.⁴ In a third, ten CIOs who had been interviewed in a 1986 study...