If you're a CIO today, chances are that you are being asked to take part in a relatively new conversation for most business executives. For lack of a better term, the buzzword that is being bounced around the executive suite is "sustainability," which covers everything from how your company responds to a disaster to how much carbon your operations are throwing off into the environment.

The reason that the CIO is being dragged into these conversations is that business executives first want some hard data with which to assess the sustainability of their organizations and then they want to know what can be done to improve that sustainability.

Before too long, the sustainability issue quickly moves from the strategic to the tactical, with a focus on reducing the amount of energy consumed by the organization. And, of course, high on the list of issues associated with power consumption is all the wattage being consumed by everything from the data center on down to the printers that never ever seem to be turned off.

As we all know, this is a hard currency issue. As the price of power continues to rise, corporate management notes its effect on the bottom line, and IT people are frequently required to come to terms with long-term nemeses in their organizations such as the facilities manager. For instance, a lot of CIOs are grappling with reducing the power footprint of their data centers to both lower the cost of running the data center and reduce the amount of carbon their companies throw off into the environment. That may mean something relatively simple such as improving the water and air cooling in the data center or it may mean moving the entire data center to another country or location that has better access to low-cost power.

But that's only one example of the larger sustainability conversation that is starting to get front-and-center attention in the board room. Vendors such as SAP are arguing that sustainability ultimately means that corporations will need a unified approach to their enterprise software applications so they can actually see where the real risks are to the business. For the CIO, that could mean an expensive and drawn-out upgrade process that would be driven more by perceived risks than actual threats to the business.

Whatever the outcome of all this newfound concern for sustainability, the one thing that is clear is that business executives are going to be asking their CIOs to be a lot more knowledgeable about a whole range of business issues that, at first glance, may seem a little remote from the IT department. But upon closer review, it's becoming pretty clear that there is no business process today that isn't in some way driven by an IT system.

These and other issues affecting the ever-evolving role of the CIO, such as cost control and talent retention, will serve as the heart of our upcoming Ziff Davis Enterprise CIO Summit, which will be held May 6 through 9 at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Half Moon Bay, Calif.

We invite you to register for the event because now more than ever the role of the CIO is changing, which spells both opportunity and risk in a world where the business expectations for IT are growing by leaps and bounds every day.