This is the fourth newsletter in a series that has been looking at the overall role of the CIO. We have based this series on our survey of 243 IT professionals as well as our interviews with a network tools architect, an enterprise networks manager and a CIO. Today, we'll discuss what we think are the top five priorities for CIOs.

While it pains us to say it, collectively we have over 50 years of experience from numerous roles in IT. Based on that experience and our ongoing market research we have established the top five priorities that we would like to see CIOs focus on. The first of those should not be a surprise to any of you who read this column regularly and that is to develop a strong application delivery function. We have written extensively about the fact that successful IT organization need to evolve from where they look at each component of IT in isolation to where they look at the components holistically.

Our second priority is to place greater emphasis on developing and acquiring more WAN-friendly applications. This fits in the category of an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. In particular, if IT organizations paid more attention to how an application would run over the WAN before they acquired or developed the application, a lot of the headaches that occur once an application has been deployed over the WAN could be avoided.

Our third priority is to break down the organizational and technological stovepipes that exist inside of virtually all large IT organizations. One of the reasons that ensuring acceptable application performance is so difficult is that any component of IT can cause an application to degrade. This includes any part of the network (e.g., LAN, WAN, SAN) as well as the servers, operating system, database, security device (e.g., firewall, intrusion detection system, intrusion protection system, etc.) as well as the application itself. Planning for each component of IT in isolation increases the probability that the overall system will not perform well. Troubleshooting each component of IT in isolation increases the mean time to repair a problem.

The next priority on our list is to implement more effective processes both within IT and between IT and the rest of the business. There is always a need for effective processes between IT and the rest of the business in order to ensure that IT is demonstrating business value and is receiving an appropriate level of resources. That need, however, is heightened in tough economic times like the ones we are in now when there is typically pressure on all support organizations to cut their budgets. There is also tremendous benefit to be had by implementing better processes within the IT organization. For example, better processes are required in order to reduce the mean time to repair (MTTR) a trouble.

Steve Taylor is president of Distributed Networking Associates and publisher/editor-in-chief of Webtorials. Jim Metzler is vice president of Ashton, Metzler & Associates.