Indeed, Jensen was in similar company at this week's Gartner Inc. outsourcing conference in Orlando. Outsourcing IT, which often now includes managing numerous vendors as part of a multisourcing strategy, is still new for many companies. And the career paths leading to those management jobs are as varied as the people now struggling to stay on top of outsourcing strategies.

"I did the bits and bytes," said Jensen, who did coding work in languages such as Assembler and managed technical units at Peoria, Ill.-based Caterpillar. But in his mid-40s, Jensen wanted to take advantage of some of the opportunities available at the company and earned an MBA. Today, the 34-year IT veteran uses his background and business skills to manage offshore and on-shore vendor relationships.

For those interested in taking on similar roles, Jensen's top advice is to learn business skills. "That's absolutely most important," he said. "Beyond that, it's communication skills, interpersonal skills."

Another person who moved from a technical background to a high-level management post is Mack Murrell, the senior director of enterprise IT operations and services AT The Dow Chemical Co. He is part of a three-person leadership team that overseas Dow's IT operations and was trained as an electrical engineer. But "I didn't want to be a senior electrical engineer at a chemical company," he said.

Dow has outsourced most of its IT operations to IBM, Hewlett-Packard Co. and Accenture Ltd. As a result, the Midland, Mich.-based firm, which employs about 42,000 people, has an internal IT staff of about 600.