DURING THE PAST 10 years, IT spending has accelerated dramatically, ending with two years of almost excessive Y2K and e-business investment. At the same time, productivity in the U.S. economy has boomed, and there is growing consensus among economists and business leaders that this rise is directly linked to IT investment. Nevertheless, IT executives are still under pressure to prove and measure the worth of their departments, while naysayers continue to challenge the costs and returns associated with IT. And today's current economic downturn has brought questions about the value of IT into even sharper focus.

To find out just how much IT means to businesses and how it contributed to them overall, InfoWorld commissioned a study of 100 top-level business executives and 100 top-level IT executives at companies of all sizes.

The results are surprising because they reveal just how positively IT is viewed and valued by American business today. The core question in our survey asked respondents simply how valuable IT was to their company. The majority of respondents (70 percent) said IT was absolutely essential to their company's business objectives, whereas only one person in 200 said that IT didn't affect the company's business objectives at all.

Dawn Lepore, vice chairman and CIO of financial brokerage house Charles Schwab in San Francisco, says that every single product and service Schwab offers is touched by technology. "On the very busiest day at our Web site ... we had just under 100,000 simultaneous sessions, which means that we had 100,000 of our customers interacting with us at the same time. All you have to think about is what it would cost to build enough call centers to have 100,000 employees be able to handle 100,000 phone calls at any point in time and you can see the value that technology adds," she says.