How Important is IT?

Back in July, Baseline Magazine published a checklist for evaluating the importance of a firm's CIO, to her company. The checklist is based on the US DoD's Directive 5144.1 [PDF], which was issued in May. The directive details the accountability of the DoD's CIO -- basically elevating the DoD's CIO to an executive level within the DOD, charged with authority to make real decisions. It basically moved IT from an order taker, responding to the whims of the other divisions within the DoD, to a contributor to the overall success of the DoD.

Baseline condensed the DoD's directive into a nice Excel spreadsheet that asks 24 questions to quantitatively rank a firm's CIO. Granted the answers to the questions are pretty subjective -- and if you already have problems with IT's stature within your organization, you undoubtedly already know about them -- the spreadsheet does serve to point to some areas where you, as an IT dweeb, could contribute to raising IT's profile.