Yet, when you look at companies that have undergone massive cultural transformation, who do you think drove that change? These three CIOs have found their own ways to combat that enterprisewide lack of understanding of IT's role.

Create a technology council. When Bill Krivoshik joined Marsh and McLennan in 2009, he was the company's first enterprise CIO. The firm had historically been managed as a holding company, and while the new CEO wanted to keep the companies separate, he saw value in looking horizontally for points of cooperation.

Krivoshik started by building a centralized technology group, but he still had to convince the business units to accept it. "People understood the need to aggregate vendor spend," he says. "But the company hadn't been run that way for the last hundred years. This was a huge cultural shift."

"The company CIOs all agreed to reduce the number of vendors we used," says Krivoshik. "But then you get down to which two, and each CIO wants his or her own." Establishing a technology council allowed the business CIOs to work out the vendor decisions at the same table with the chief procurement officer, the CFO and Krivoshik.

"There will always be tension between the enterprise and the business units," he says. "Having to make their case to the group helped to influence more collaborative behavior."