No one likes to be stereotyped. Yet here we are, in our sixth annual "State of the CIO" report, trying to box you into narrowly defined CIO archetypes. And we know what you're thinking: "I don't fit into any of these categories. I have to do a little of this, a little of that, and a lot of everything else to do my job right."

We agree. What we're trying to do by extracting these four varieties of the CIO species—Business Leader, Innovation Agent, Operational Expert and Turnaround Artist—from the data our survey collected from you is to identify and define all those demands on your time and to illuminate all the myriad roles you may be called on to play over the course of your career, in order to help you see where you fit in (and where you could fit in) along a broad swath of possibilities. This is an attempt to reconcile the personal skills you bring to the job—your leadership and project management skills, for example—with the different ways your company may see IT fitting into its long- and short-term goals. For instance, you may be called on to play all these roles at once in a company that views IT as providing a strategic and competitive advantage. Or you may be a younger CIO, working to acquire the skills you'll need to grow along with an equally young company that's just beginning to discover the advantages that IT can bring. Or, unhappily, you may be a frustrated visionary working for a company that doesn't see IT as anything more than a fungible tool that needs, above all, to be cheap.

You may disagree with the categories our research has helped us devise, or you may believe there are others that we've left out. We'd love to hear about them all.

Despite all our efforts to slice and dice you, we found that one aspect of the job cuts across all boundaries and is a prerequisite for success for every CIO: a reliable IT utility. You can have the emotional intelligence of a Business Leader CIO or the project management skills of an Operational CIO, but if the basic IT utility that lets business people do their jobs isn't running up to expectations—and if its unit cost doesn't go down continually—you will soon find yourself unemployed. Guaranteed.

And we're not talking about network uptime. "The business doesn't care about 99.9 percent uptime unless you're talking about the uptime of a business process or an end-to-end capability," says Peter Weill, director of the Center for Information Systems Research and senior research scientist at the MIT Sloan School of Management.