"Business needs to close the communication gap and the CIO is the key to do that," Armstrong says. He believes that this management guide will help local companies increase their productivity and service to customers, and have IT departments become profit centers instead of cost centers - decreasing the moneys lost on failed IT projects.

Taylor actively encourages CIOs to take responsibility for the communication breakdown and presents a number of tactics to actively resolve the issue.

He notes that to align business and IT strategies, businesses should ensure that IT has a real, measurable business value, and understand how the CEO will measure it.

Four positives

In the guide Taylor also says that CEOs can give CIOs some advice. He presents four positives that CEOs want from IT leaders. These include: focusing on what technology does, and not what it is; that IT should stop differentiating itself from the rest of the business - IT is the business; IT must become a profit center not a cost center; and IT must take ownership and market itself, because it is now visible to customers.