"Why have IT report to accounting?  You show me a company where the CIO reports to the CFO, and I'll show you a company lagging in its industry in the use of technology."

Benjamin Salzmann, Acuity CEO, Quoted in "CIO to CEO: If You Want to Move Up", ComputerWorld, December 18, 2006

"In today’s global economy, a company’s success or failure may hinge on the ability to implement technology to remain competitive. The business managers of tomorrow must be able to see the big picture while also understanding the nuts and bolts that keep everything running. The type of thinking that was once left to technologists is now essential for business managers."

C.J. Kelly, "Can a Manager Be a Techie and Survive?", Computerworld, November 20, 2006

C.J. Kelly is the alias for a security manager that wishes to hide her real name and employer in her articles for Computerworld.

Those in IT with any ambition to move up the ranks need to understand their organization's business better, obviously. What isn't acknowledged so readily by management is the need for managers to know IT better.

"But where would we be without the information technology workers whose vision and drive made those technologies come to life within their corporations?

It's a question that chief information officers find themselves asking more often these days. Indeed, CIOs are staring at a future with an aging workforce, a shrinking number of computer science students and an intensifying competition for information technology talent."

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"Coming in with answers when you don't have a real deep sense of the environment is very dangerous."

-Amelia "Mely" Tynan, CIO, Tufts University, quoted in "CIOs on the Move: How five IT chiefs made the leap to new companies", ComputerWorld, August 21, 2006.