The potential for IT to play a central role in business innovation is so great that, over the years, it's been suggested that the title chief information officer might be changed to chief innovation officer. The fact that, by and large, that hasn't happened, says a lot about expectations for the CIO role and points to the reason why many companies can’t seem to leverage their IT strategies into new business methods and models.

Authors C.K. Prahalad and M.S. Krishnan address this dilemma in The New Age Of Innovation. They refer to it as the "line of business and CIO disconnect," because it involves a gulf between what business managers want to accomplish and what CIOs perceive their jobs to be—and how they're perceived. That the CIO is often thought of as operating in a technology silo concerned primarily with "internal efficiency," for instance, is a significant limiting factor. "It is not surprising that the CIO focus is on maintenance of existing systems and not business innovation," the authors write.

According to our very unscientific online survey, only about a third (32%) of respondents feel that the CIO contributes directly to "the innovation, flexibility, and speed needed to create value in rapidly evolving markets." A quarter feel that the CIO is "too bogged down" in legacy issues to support new initiatives. However, the majority (42%) feel it isn't an either-or issue: Their CIOs contribute to innovation when they're able to, but that it's not something that's generally expected of them.

Prahalad and Krishnan recommend that the CIO position be overhauled to accommodate the imperatives of a global, networked business environment. "The tensions between flexibility, efficiency, and the need to focus on flexible business processes force a new convergence of the roles of the business managers, CIOs, and chief technology officers (CTOs)," they write. For companies to be competitive in a dynamic marketplace that demands continuous innovation, that convergence must represent more than just a clever re-interpretation of an acronym.