When hired as CIO by Cashman in 1998, Glassen had no contact with theCEO or the executive committee. When a second CEO, an IT enthusiast, came aboard, Glassen was invited to participate in the executive committee. In late 2000, a more cost-conscious CEO took over, looked at what IT had spent and what it had produced, and decided not to include the IT head on the committee. "I was dropped as a participant, and rightly so," he says. "I needed to prove that IT had value. And until I could justify that there was an ROIROI to what we were doing, IT was relegated to a support function again." Alles zu ROI auf CIO.de

Since then, Glassen, who reports to the CFO, has been trying to earn his way back into the monthly meetings, upping his face time with theCEO and communicating the financial impact of all IT initiatives. It's working, to an extent. "I'm participating in a somewhat active format," Glassen reports. "I'm not involved in the decision making anymore, but I try to be involved in the information dispensing aspect of it. The CFO usually tells me the things he knows about so I'm not totally out of the loop."

When Money Talks, I.T. Has Nothing to Say

As executives and corporate boards remain focused on cost cutting, they're tightening the reins on IT. According to the 2003 "State of the CIO" survey, 84 percent of CIOs said their IT function is currently being budgeted as a cost center that generates expenses rather than an investment center that generates new business capabilities.

And as corporations continue to cut technology spending, more and more companies are going for an off-the-shelf IT strategy, influenced in part by vendors' claims that they can clean up the "mess" CIOs have created. "Many organizations have come to believe that they can live with a certain level of technology that's plug-and-play, not complex,and gets the job done," says Highland Partners' Schneidermeyer.

Even CIOs are drinking the Kool-Aid. "It only makes business sense. If you can get it out of the box, why build it? Today, everybody's there with the 'buy before build' mantra," says David Robinson, CIO of insurance broker Lockton Cos., who recently replaced an application built in-house with a Web-based system provided by an ASP.