Kathleen Melymuka

DBAs are often the last to be involved in planning but the first to be called when things go wrong.

Educating your CXO is "incredibly important," says Mark Jeffery, assistant professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. Here's his basic syllabus for educating the CIO, which he employs in his MBA class, "Enterprise Technology for General Managers."

Surveys show that about 75 per cent of people consider themselves extroverts, but anecdotal evidence indicates that the majority of IT folks are introverts, struggling to deal with their extroverted peers, business partners and customers.

When Bill Hagerup was a novice project manager, he attended a meeting in which managers were picking people for upcoming projects. He let the other project managers step all over him and ended up with the leftovers. "The project didn't go well, and I vowed I would never let that happen again," he says.

When Bill Hagerup was a novice project manager, he attended a meeting in which managers were picking people for upcoming projects. He let the other project managers step all over him and ended up with the leftovers.

Each October, a group of IT leaders walks the hills and hollows of the Gettysburg battlefield retracing Gen. George S. Pickett's charge, but they aren't studying history; they're studying business.

CIO Bob Plante was under the gun. A big security and controls audit of CIT Group Inc., completed in September, had left a trail of "red marks" - mostly related to legislation such as the USA Patriot Act and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act - that had to be addressed immediately.

Half your IT middle managers may be planning to quit as soon as the economy improves.