What do you think the CEO should know about IT?

Have you ever wondered why there is a disconnect between IT and business in many organizations? Does it start at the top?  

Regardless of your position in any organization, can you explain how IT decisions get made?

Some business articles allude to a poor relationship between IT and other departments being a function of poor management.  Would this gap disappear if the C-suite had a better understanding of Information Technology?

What do you think the CEO or anyone at the C-suite should know about IT?  Here are my top items: 

• Clear understanding of how IT decisions should get made
• IT Governance
• How to integrate business and IT
• How to use the business case in IT and other divisions
• How project management methodologies for all divisions can make an organization more effective
• How data integrity is critical to the operation of the organization
• How to make the IT department's services efficient
• How to protect the organization from natural and man-made disasters 
• Why it's important to protect data
• Fundamental understanding of the cloud
• Basic understanding of big data and business intelligence
• Know that IT can be socially conscientious with green IT, and finally,
• How to undertake the development of an IT strategy

Recognizing that CxOs often don't understand IT as a starting point, I wanted to explore what the CxO should know about IT using a non-technical, easy-to-understand, conversational story. So have a read of the book The IT Chauffeur (Available at Amazon.com or at CreateSpace).