[Haskell-cafe] operating on nested monads

Hello everyone, I have some operations that have to be done in sequence, with each one having the result of the previous as input. They can fail, so they have signature a -> Maybe b Checking for error can be quite tedious so I use monadic operations: f :: a -> Maybe b do y <- foo x z <- boo y moo z The problems arise when I try to do the same thing within the IO Monad, i.e. the functions have signature a->IO (Maybe b) How can I achieve the same effect (if it is ever possible)? I feel like it should be something almost trivial, but I really can't get it. Thanks Marco