This is simply a rehash of old conventional wisdom - IT doesn't understand the business so they shouldn't get respect, yadayadayada. All of which the "gurus" at Forrester regurgitate uncritically. It seems the only thing that organization is interested in is push-polling their personal stock portfolios into the stratosphere. Remember the internet bust of the late 90's? Forrester was shilling for DOT-COMers by saying internet commerce was going to be a multi-billion business by 1999; well it was, but the billions were lost instead of won. So why anyone would care what these guys say is beyond me.

Clueless! In a word, you have summarized 90% of CIOs. They should be the "keepers of the data" - the head librarians! It is truly unfortunate that most "C" level executives are computer illiterate and abdicate their responsibility to these often-clueless individuals.

Yes, CIOs often want the PC / Network / Web / IT world to come back into the data center where they can control everything. They do their best to deny grass roots innovation, such as Web 2.0 and other newfangled things, easily implemented by end users without the need for permission or even administrator privileges. The CIOs are afraid. Sadly, though, the CIOs still have power to stifle individual and enterprise growth. All too often, the CIO's bosses are not technical, and so they innocently believe the lies of whimpering CIOs: "It's too-o-o-o hard to support systems if everyone is installing their own hardware and software and doing something different!" Waaah! If that's true for them, if it's really too hard for them, then these are the CIOs who should get a job elsewhere, perhaps in retail, selling shoes. Get the the hell out of IT and the hell out of the enterprise, and let us innovators grow and prosper once again. Yes, this is old news, and happened in the 1980s when PCs first hit the mainframe universe. It took a while for the mainframe CIOs to lock up all the PCs. Web 2.0 offers the chance for even end-users to outsource their independence and once again bypass small-minded, scaredy-pants CIOs. How about a story on forward thinking CIOs, instead, to inspire us that it could happen?

The ease in establishing some of the new tools have changed the game, but most CIOs are not cognizant of the changes. Reading about it is not getting them over the fear and experience of the past. Supporting your troops - by letting them try a thing or two and showcase their ideas - not simply managing them as cattle - is how you win them as allies and potentially solve shared problems. The old project tools are not necessarily the best. In the flattened organizations and overwelming workloads, everything that improves communication is worth looking at. If the CIOs life is hard... look around; We are all working late and the practitioners should have a say in improving their work situation. More than that - If you are looking for good people, it is appropriate that you support their judgement (beyond the day-to-day monkeywork) and celebrate their ideas. The expert - is the guy doing the work; Tom Peters said it over 20 years ago; Drucker would say it also; Get back in the trenches and find out what your employees can do for you - that you are truly cluesless about. There is no progress without risk and your competitors will explain it if you don't see it.

Clueless is correct.
The majority of CIOs are clueless about what will HELP the employees accomplish their mission. They have a knee jerk reaction to pulling in the latest widget to look like they are progressive - without FULLY analyzing the impact on the company and employee mission.
A better mousetrap is not necessarily a better solution - and seldom even a better mousetrap!

This is an issue that needs some radically new thinking and approaches (because it's actually a business organizational and structural problem).

The top 10 reasons for the lack of IT innovation are:

1. Innovation is always riskier than cost control.
2. Most organizations and many "pundits" regard and even say that IT is a commodity.
3. Commodities are best managed for reliability and lowest cost.
4. Technical options change and evolve extremely rapidly, making investment in a specific technology problematic. (It's easier to follow than lead.)
5. IT innovation won't benefit all organizations, you need a very comprehensive understanding of an organization's mission, processes, and bottlenecks to detect the points where IT innovation might help, and most CIOs are "siloed" whether they know it or not.
6. CIOs are asked to wear multiple hats: keep it running, keep it safe, cut costs, and innovate. Guess which one is not like the other one?
7. Few organizations have enough insight and information about the complex relationship between key factors influencing their business success (employee training, information access, employee motivation/loyalty, customer perception/loyalty, competitive challenges, etc.) to evaluate the risk/benefits of a specific IT innovation which will always require incredible cross organizational coordination, training and behavioral changes.
8. Projects that are not superbly coordinated not only incur direct costs, they also slow down everything else.
9. CIOs get fired for making wrong choices and having failed projects but not for saving money and doing small tweaks.
10. Few top level executives have the training, tools, or incentives to understand what IT can do in the areas mentioned in #7 above.

There may be more, but these are some major reasons. So… all you business gurus and analysts; how would you approach this problem? Training, incentives, organizational redesign, etc? My money would be on something completely different, something like Appreciative Inquiry see: http://appreciativeinquiry.case.edu/ which is also an innovation.

Having worked in both the operations and information technology areas of several major businesses, I found
that the operations managers and the information technology managers both lack the ability to understand what they could do together to achieve a significant level of innovation in the enterprise. Most are to busy protecting their "turf".

Reader John McAdams (earlier commentator) saved me some writing. So I'll segue from some of what he was pointing at.

CxO's who don't feel very "chiefly" should rightfully question whether their compensation is in line with how they'll actually be measured. But in the world of performance measurement, speaking truth to power is personally very expensive. How do you afford it? There's the dilemma. Any CIO who wants to use the word "Innovation" more than once a business quarter should be prepared to provide the definition of what innovation is, by distinguishing its flavors from each other: the planned, the authorized, and the actual. If the CIO is a decision maker in all three dimensions, then there is no dilemma; there's just execution. But in execution, there are two tracks to follow: priority, and production. If the CIO is not being paid to announce and decide their alignment with each other, then again there is no dilemma. There's just the matter of whether people want to know what's real or not before they take the actions they actually take. Giving action orders to the "head of IT" doesn't require having a CIO or being realistic. Meanwhile, getting orders can be done with one hand tied behind your back. But being held responsible for the consequences of someone else's decisions is clearly not a prescription for being the chief.

It's just as difficult to replace 'social networking' [to use the current catchphrase] within a business model with a mixture of software and hardware as it is to expect one individual to attend solely to DP (to date myself) and yet somehow generate the data to be processed...
--Glenn