Leader: Where's the value in IT?

Think you should be earning more money? Who doesn't.

Salary is a subject close to all our hearts - and wallets - and most people would probably award themselves a pay rise if they could.

Certainly half of silicon.com's CIO Jury user panel said IT chiefs should be compensated on par with other business unit heads and should receive more generous performance-related bonuses.

Is it any wonder so many boardrooms are still sceptical about the value of their IT investments - including how much they pay their CIOs?

But this raises the question of how to measure IT performance. A shocking statistic in an e-Skills UK survey of 1,000 organisations this week found that just one in ten has a proper process for calculating the return on investment (ROI) of IT expenditure.

How do the other 90 per cent manage? By those well-known and scientifically proven methods of "informed guesswork" and "personal intuition", according to the study.

Is it any wonder so many boardrooms are still sceptical about the value of their IT investments - including how much they pay their CIOs? It's certainly no wonder that businesses are increasingly obsessed with IT metrics.

It's an issue that's becoming more and more important. Earlier this month Gartner warned that businesses are losing faith in their tech investments and said IT bosses need to think beyond automating existing business processes or face simply being a commodity utility.

This is reflected in the priority now being placed on IT governance and benchmarking. CIOs are under pressure like never before to demonstrate they're not just a black hole for money and that they're doing more than just keeping the lights on.

So back to the salary debate - are CIOs underpaid? Probably. (At least, when compared to their boardroom counterparts.) But do CIOs need to do a better job of showing real business returns on their IT investment before they get that raise? Almost certainly.