If there could be only one thing that aligned IT and the business, it would be applications. They are the engine of almost any business process, enabling and empowering today's knowledge economy. The challenge for CIOs, of course, is choosing the right mix of technologies to easily capture, store, roll up, automate and secure information and process. Get these right, and you don't hear much about it; get these wrong, and you never stop hearing complaints.

Our special report on application development this month has at its core a key finding: that app dev was the most-cited strategic IT priority for CIO Decisions readers in 2007, according to a subscriber survey. That's likely because it's intrinsic to all three areas on the CIO's agenda -- cutting cost, increasing revenue and managing risk.