How IBM Intends to Kill IT Chaos in 2009

"One of the real opportunities now for CIOs around the world is their ability to drive innovation for their companies," Hennessy said.

"CIOs are positioned very well for this, because they see uniquely the organization end to end, they see how the processes are interlocked, how the applications and data flows, and at the same time, they've got access to some very cool networking and Web 2.0 social networking tools."

People don't realize that IBM is leading in the social networking space, from within the company, Hennessy said.

"We have over 15,000 blogs that are in place now; we have wikis that over half of our population use; we have online idea-generation forums—for example, ThinkPlace—[and] we use Jam technology to get input from all our employees around the world on real important topics to our senior executives," Hennessy said.

IBM also has a Facebook-like social networking tool called Beehive that employees around the world as an in-house communication channel.

"We do have a lot of IBM employees around the world in different business units … so the use of these tools has been very important to us to develop relationships, to build collaboration, to talk about new ideas and innovation and take those ideas to the marketplace for IBM or for our clients," Hennessy said.