Almost 30 years after the introduction of the CIO position, the ideal CIO reporting structure (whether the CIO should report to the CEO or the CFO) is yet to be identified. There is an intuitive assumption among some proponents of IT that the CIO should always report to the CEO to promote the importance of IT and the CIO’s clout in the firm, while some adversaries of IT call for a CIO–CFO reporting structure to keep a tab on IT spending. However, we challenge these two ad hoc prescriptions by arguing that neither CIO reporting structure is necessarily optimal, and that the CIO reporting structure should not be used to gauge the strategic role of IT in the firm.