This is the fourth newsletter in a series that has been looking at the overall role of the CIO. We have based this series on our survey of 243 IT professionals as well as our interviews with a network tools architect, an enterprise networks manager and a CIO. In the last newsletter we identified what we believe should be a CIO's top five priorities. We are going to use this newsletter to look at what CIO priorities currently are and compare that to what we think they should be.

We asked the survey respondents to indicate their CIO’s top five priorities. Those priorities were control cost, enhance security, align goals across all of IT, demonstrate the business value of IT, and develop a strong application delivery function. We had cost control on our list and were not surprised that it also was at the top of the list for CIOs. We were also pleased that developing a strong application delivery function, which was at the top of our list, also made the list for CIOs.

We asked one CIO about his priorities for the next year. He stated that one of his top priorities for the next year is situational. His company recently made a major acquisition. As such, one of the CIO’s top priorities for the next year is the integration of the new company. The CIO added that another one of his top priorities is to continually improve their processes. To exemplify the progress that his organization has already made relative to process improvement, the CIO stated that as recently as a year and a half ago, it took his organization 100 days from when they got a request for a new Unix server until that server was actually in production. He said that this lengthy implementation interval was because a large number of groups were involved in the implementation and that the groups worked in a serial fashion. As a result of changing their processes, they now implement a new Unix server in under 10 days.

As noted, this is the last newsletter in this series. However, if you are going to be at the Interop conference in NYC in September, Jim will be moderating a roundtable discussion at the conference with three CIOs on both their role as well as the evolving role of the IT organization.

Steve Taylor is president of Distributed Networking Associates and publisher/editor-in-chief of Webtorials. Jim Metzler is vice president of Ashton, Metzler & Associates.