Few question the transformational power of information technology, even during rough economic times. But there are people behind these transformations?innovative leaders with the vision to see where IT can make a difference and the will and focus to drive it there.

The CIO 20/20 Vision Awards honor outstanding individuals in two categories: 20 creators and marketers of technology; and 20 practitioners who use IT to make great things happen. In the first category, we have chosen scientists, inventors and vendor executives who have developed and evangelized the technology that has become so central to business today. In the second group are CIOs and other practitioner executives who have creatively, and with great foresight, utilized that technology to transform their organization and, in many cases, their industry.

This is not a popularity contest. For instance, while some high-tech leaders are revered for their brilliant inventiveness (such as Tim Berners-Lee, the architect of the World Wide Web) others (such as Bill Gates) have left disgruntled users, bitter competitors and other detractors in the wake of their drive to build software empires around their vision.

But in their own way, all 40 have had a profound impact on their organization, on business and on their industry. They share essential characteristics, such as the imagination to think big, the passion to go after what they want, the ability to take risks and the persistence to push for results.

20 Who Made It Possible

Our list of technology developers includes not only the scientists who were able to act on their technology vision by promulgating standards and revolutionary tools but also a group of vendors who were able to build markets and deliver the tools to the masses. So we have Ray Kurzweil, a futurist and inventor who, with single-minded focus, created various artificial intelligence technologies, including speech recognition software used by doctors to dictate medical reports into a computer. Showing his range of vision, Kurzweil is currently at work on a book about reversing the aging process. Kurzweil maintains that progress is ever accelerating and by using mathematical models that factor in the exponential technology growth rate, he says that the next 20 years will yield as much progress as did the entire 20th century.

Also in this category is Berners-Lee, whose passion for the free exchange of information has been focused on the creation of Web standards, including HTML and XML. Today he continues to work diligently to keep technology specifications open and free in a business climate, he says, in which companies are building "nuclear stockpiles of patents."