ABSTRACT
Information Week and other respected IT industry trade journals regularly publish lists of the best chief information officers (CIOs) and IT organizations. Admittedly, some of these competitions are mere beauty contests or have a contestant pool biased toward very large enterprises with enormous IT budgets. However, drilling below the surface of these industry surveys soon reveals at least one attribute that distinguishes the winners of these contests: the strength of the alignment between the information technology needs of these enterprises and what their IT units actually deliver. In other words, properly aligned IT organizations are seen as regularly delivering the right stuff to their customers.
