By John Zipperer

Most CIOs have great stories to tell about their company's IT investments—what they mean to the bottom line and how they change their business. Many CIOs, when asked, even recount those stories to the business units. Sometimes, however, there's a disconnect between what CIOs are saying and what's being understood. IT executives don't always use language or terminology that non-IT executives in their organizations can understand and appreciate.

CIOs have the best intentions in mind. In an effort to demonstrate IT's value to the enterprise, they offer up metrics that may be overly technical and don't always map to the business processes and services of the enterprise that the IT supports or makes possible. "IT has been very good for the last 20 or 30 years at fixing things, but not as good at demonstrating value," says Peter Waterhouse, Senior Principal of Enterprise IT Management (EITM) Strategy at CA. "This was fine in the past, but as people take for granted the 24x7 availability of IT, fixing things doesn't equate to business value."

Waterhouse says that in the past, when IT tried to report its value to the business side of the company, it measured the wrong things and collected the wrong data. This shortfall may have been challenging to everyone involved, but it was something that could be worked around. Today, however, CIOs and their business counterparts need and want open lines of communication for a variety of reasons. "It's like a translation problem: taking those technology elements and translating them into something the business understands," Waterhouse says. "This is going to be especially important now, given what's happening to the economy. Attention will turn to IT, which is sometimes considered a cost center because there's not always an obvious link to revenue, and the conversation will invariably come around to cost-cutting."