Now picture this: your CEO, COO, CFO, and CIO meet to discuss levels of IT spending and next year's IT budget. So what do they talk about when they talk about IT spending? Certainly, they talk about planned levels of IT spending and whether the projected trend is up or down and by how much. But also important, they talk about the distribution of the company's IT dollars and the allocation of IT resources. Each executive brings to the table his or her view of the role of IT within the company, and these views shape the discussion. Is IT an overhead operating expense to be tightly controlled and managed? Or can IT offer a strategic competitive advantage and be viewed as an investment with acceptable levels of risk and reward? This is where the conversation becomes oblique and indirect, and we must listen to the subtext carefully to determine our executives' position on the overhead-versus-strategic-enabler continuum. They might talk about the management processes used to allocate and manage the company's IT resources; the issue of governance is closely linked to any discussion of IT spending. How and why have we chosen to invest in X rather than Y? The conversation also likely will turn to IT performance and how well IT did with the resources it received last year and the year before and so on.