CIOs who are fortunate enough to report to the CEO would be wise not to bank too heavily on that fact. Other C-level executives can make or break you too. Quish notes that she once had a great relationship with her CEO but got fired anyway. "Unfortunately, I didn't bother with my peers, and they joined forces and got me outplaced," Quish recalls."You need access to the entire executive team. And the best way to do that is to be a key component of their projects, provide advanced warnings of problems, recommend solutions and speak in business language--not technology. Then they'll actually want you involved."

If there's no official relationship with the CEO, CIOs should create one, unofficially. "I report to the CFO," says Fields. "But when the CEO has a meeting or get-together, I'm there. A lot of times, I'm the only person there who doesn't report to the chairman." Fields never makes a point of that fact other than to make a joke about it. But he knows that the day he's no longer there, he could be on his way out. And that's no joke.

No CIO? You Don't Want To Go There

Once CIOs regain credibility, they can argue against the weakening of the CIO role from a position of strength. And the case to be made is powerful.

Former Williams-Sonoma CIO Brownell says CIOs need to make it clear that the cost of handing the responsibility for IT over to the CFO (a reporting situation that's almost never set up for any other CXO) can be high. "In the past, I've had the CFO say to me, 'Can you stop working on this thing for the next three months?" Brownell recalls."Every time we stop, we lose 20 percent to 30 percent of the work we've done, and we have to start all over from scratch."

Sikorsky Aircraft CFO Longo enthusiastically supports a policy that requires his company's CIO to report straight to the top. "They asked, Should the new CIO report to you now?" says Longo. "But I believe theIT function should not sit in the background. It should be at the table with other key support functions like finance, like HR. Out of all of them, IT has the most potential to change the business."