I found the answers to those questions in my own recent encounters with some of those individuals. Last month, I asked a favor of several CIOs in the San Francisco Bay area.

IDG, Computerworld's parent company, was holding a meeting of its editors from around the world, and I asked the CIOs to talk to us about their professional concerns and about how we as journalists can do a better job of delivering the information they need.

Two of the people who dropped everything to come by were Satish Ajmani, CIO of Santa Clara County, Calif., and Sateesh Lele, chairman of Global Data Systems USA and former CIO at Frito-Lay and Avon Products. Their message was clear: More than anything, they want no-holds-barred accounts of enterprise technology applications -- not vendor "success stories," but the actual experiences of their peers, warts and all, so that they can learn how real-world IT problems are solved.

A couple of weeks earlier in Orlando, another group of IT professionals had gathered at a Computerworld summit on conquering IT complexity. Addressing the issue were Dan Agronow of The Weather Channel, Frank Enfanto of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Massachusetts, Allan Frank of Answerthink, Louis Gutierrez of the University of Massachusetts Medical School, and Joe Puglisi of Emcor. Their candid accounts of dealing with IT complexity were an intriguing precursor to the message that would be delivered by their peers in San Francisco.

Ajmani, Lele, Agronow, Enfanto, Frank, Gutierrez and Puglisi are IT leaders because they do what IT leaders do: They sacrifice their time and share their knowledge and experience to serve the IT profession. All these individuals have something else in common: Each one of them is a past Premier 100 honoree.