Part 2

Here are some more good quotes and advice from panel discussions at the recent MIT CIO Symposium:

--Jim Walker, COO, Morgan Stanley, Smith Barney: There is often "creative tension" between the CIO and the COO; at our company, as we undertake the largest corporate integration in history, we are joined at the hip, like it or not."

--Limit yourself to five key projects at a time, advises, Ben-Saba Hasan, VP ISD at Wal-Mart. Then, collaborate with other business leaders to show results.

The three most common reasons that CIOs get fired, he said, are: Lack of trust, poor relationships and poor accountability--"it has nothing to do with IT. You have to deliver what you say you will."

--Steven Elefant, CIO, Heartland Payments Systems on security and mobility: "There are millions of opportunities for the bad guys to destroy us. The good guys still operate in silos, the bad guys share hacker tips on web sites. We need to adopt their ways."

--Andy Ellis, Senior director of Information Security, Akamai: CIOs have to "enable business users to take risks and then manage the risk; you can't eliminate them." [Read our Q&A with Andy here.]

--Steven Elefant: Don't ignore the inside security threats which are usually greater than the outside threats.