At the heart of being a CIO is the responsibility to manage an entire department of technical professionals. It is your job to provide an overall direction for the department to move in and when problems arise, and they always do, you are going to have to work with your staff in order to create solutions.

What you'll find inside:

• CIO lessons from the war in Iraq
• RISK management in IT: how do you do it correctly?
• WHY Toyota's IT department is broken and why that's OK
• Three secrets that oil companies use to run a great it department

Knowing how to accomplish all of this can be a real challenge. However, clever CIOs realize that they can get helpful tips from the military based on the how they've handled the conflict in Iraq. CIOs also understand that running an IT department is filled with risk - many things can and will go wrong. This means that they need to become adept at risk management.

Nothing is going to get accomplished if you don't have the funding to accomplish it. This means that a critical CIO skill is the ability to get funds allocated to you from the CFO. This is what you're going to need in order to keep everything up and running like it should be.

Taking the time to look around can provide you with an opportunity to discover well-run IT shops that can provide you with suggestions on how you can run your IT department. A great place to look is Toyota's IT department, which does a fantastic job dealing with change as it happens.

In order to keep an IT department operating correctly, we need to understand what could cause it to be run into the ground and then avoid doing those things. Once again, looking for suggestions from well-run IT departments such as those found at the large oil companies can show us the way.