Other CIO warnings in the report's findings are the indication that only 30% of respondents believe that IT is providing clear business benefits, and that "only 32% of CFOs said they see the CIO as a strategic partner." That final percentage seems to track with the survey result that 47% of respondents see IT as strategic in the first place.

This Gartner survey is being made available only to people registering with Gartner.

Van Decker does note that the concentration of CFOs among respondents gives extraordinary weight to their own biases. And the author is actually far from pessimistic about the role of the CIO's job, although he says it could diminish even more if CIOs fail to work more collaboratively with the CFO and others in their businesses.

"If the [CIO] role doesn't evolve to be more business oriented, "business areas will go off and do their own thing and involve IT at a minimum," he writes.

Read these reports on the study from CFOworld sister publications and .