But as that IT treasure became something every enterprise felt it had to have, many CIOs, coming up through the technology ranks, lacked the business skills to run departments that, in many cases, rivaled in size and budget of some of the companies' largest business units.

ROI? What was that? Spreadsheets? Isn't that something Excel did?

"It's not that CIOs were irresponsible; it's just that they weren't fiscally aware," says Bill Glassen, CIO of Cashman Equipment, which sells and leases Caterpillar construction equipment. "If the president of the company said one day, 'Hey, I want to do e-commerce," Glassen says, "the CIO bought tons of servers, hired Web programmers, basically spent a lot of money," frequently without building a business case.

Of course, when the dotcom bubble burst and the bottom fell out of the market, CEOs didn't need to look far for a scapegoat. "As a leadership position, the CIO role had little or no credibility left, and we deserved every bit of it," says Malcolm Fields, CIO of office furniture and fireplace manufacturer Hon Industries.

And so CIOs, who had achieved a place in the executive ranks and a straight-line reporting relationship to the top of the organizational chart, are now seeing that access threatened.