Abbie Lundberg

A Dickensian take on the state of business technology leadership today.

At 34, he became CIO of Wal-Mart. At 37, he ran Sam's Clubs as its president and CEO. Now at 40, he's chief operating officer at Microsoft, where he leads a global organization of more than 32,000 employees. Kevin Turner shares his secrets of how to succeed in business.

Succeeding as a CIO takes more than technical acumen; you need to understand your enterprise's culture.

Right now, CIOs are stuck between a rock and a hard place. On one side, there is growing demand for new IT capabilities and high expectations for payoff. On the other, there are greatly constrained resources.

If you look at the numbers these days, it doesn't seem like there's a whole lot going on. For many businesses, revenue and profits are down. Investment and employment, especially in IT, are also down.

In every recession, consumers - individual and corporate - are more cautious about spending and tend to...

CIOs have an easier time with the service part of their job, providing "dial tone" and applications to support the business as it exists today. This is giving them more time for the business leadership part of their job, and with CIOs that generally means thinking about how IT can transform things.

Given the opportunity, most of us would opt to let someone else take responsibility for difficult and uncertain endeavours. It's human nature to avoid risk - it's been engineered into us since cavemen ran away from big scary beasts. There's also a certain amount of insecurity at play: we feel, deep down, that we're really just not that qualified for the job.