SillyGoneValley

To blog or not to blog? I always wanted to write something other than a business document or email. I want to express, strike that, I need to express my self-indulgent sense of humor and share my musings on what is really going down between business and IT because I unlike others truly understand. I hope to combine humor with learning to create new dialogue and a few laughs at the water cooler. And I look forward to getting trashed and enlightened by your responses. There will be no real names of people or companies so I don’t get sued. So OK, don’t even try it, OK?

The scenarios and circumstances have been crafted from my real experience to suit my ego. Any interpretation or assignment to real people by you, the reader, is your own damn fault. Then again, perception is reality….how any times have you heard that lame excuse for why you are under performing or need to be replaced? Sure you got everything done on time, under budget and with all the functional requirements of the business met and your employee scores are world class, but the customer didn’t like it so who the hell else are we going to blame? We perceive it’s you, CIO, as it certainly can’t be the fault of anyone IN the business! Whew, that felt really good….thanks I’m better now.

But I digress; we all have roles we adopt at work to survive. In no other functional unit of a company is it truer than in Information Technology (IT). IT is a mystical place, more accurately it is like Purgatory, neither heaven nor hell, just eternally frustrating. Although I could be wrong as it might be hell. As I mentioned before in order to survive we adopt persona's, take on new roles, to get through the daily scene we are each acting in. Even in the surreal environment of IT we the technologist, I mean business person, no really I mean technologist. OK, no matter who I need to be today or at this moment there are certain truths or axioms we must reference to maintain our balance. Remember from your 10th grade geometry that axioms are statements that are true without proof or generally accepted as fact (pretty much anything the CEO says), such as two points determine a straight line or the world of IT should never, never be confused with the world of business. I think Peter Drucker would agree. One more proviso, I am going to make many references to companies, people, books and statistics that will be wrong or inaccurate as long as I think it’s funny. No different than our recent presidential and vice-presidential candidates. Wait a minute; aren’t the police detectives that work the prostitution crimes called vice? Never mind.

So what better fodder is there for the ironic, nonsensical and always entertaining situations for a guy like me than the world of business and specifically the world inside a world, IT? When you are a 50 year old CIO (like me) and have a lot of time on your hands (read that temporarily unemployed, I hope) you get to thinking about a lot of stuff you normally couldn’t dwell on before because you have a job to keep you from thinking. Add to that having experienced the shock of being diagnosed with colon cancer, getting your colon tailored and imbibing on the chemo cocktail for six months you get downright philosophical; as alcoholics anonymous would say you experience ‘a moment of clarity’. During my recuperation and subsequent time out ( it’s a time out because I must have been a bad CIO and now have to go to my room to think about it before I can come out and play again) I have had the luxury of doing new and interesting things to expand my emotional intelligence.

I created my profile on LinkedIn, 100% complete thank you very much. I even answered a question and was voted the best answer so don’t you go questioning my credentials to wax philosophically on IT! Strengthening my credibility are the many, many recommendations I received from my closest of friends. Yes, of course they were in exchange for my recommendation first, but I got them didn’t I! A recruiter called me about a job and at the end of our discussion he asked me what my peers would say about me? I suggested he read my LinkedIn profile for recommendations. He laughed very hard then said, “no, really what would they say?” So much for social networking. I guess I will have to really talk to people.

What else have I done with my new found freedoms you ponder? Well, I have read numerous articles in CIO magazine, CIO Online, CIO Insight, Gartner Reviews, HBR, eWeek, Dilbert, Baseline, Wired, Playboy, 451,….and a few books I had told people I read before like Good to Great, which I don’t think was all that good let alone great. I even participate in Google Forums like Cloud Computing….the most prolific group of BS artists yet. Talk about pondering your navel. One becomes keenly aware that conceptually it’s often the same old crap all over again. Yes there are new tools and incarnations of old ideas but few of them work on a commercial level or if they do it can cost you your career to deploy them. In IT when we can’t get the first ten iterations to work right, change the name, spin the value and we’re off to the races again! For chronological reference I programmed in IBM’s VM/OS in 1982. What a revelation that a server can do the same thing 25 years later! Of course new terms are created to rename and repackage and most importantly re-sell. Virtualization sounds so nifty right? Try it in production when the hardware craps out and you are virtually f@#$’d because the recovery capabilities aren’t ..oh I don’t know…ROBUST! Oops. Take a deep breath. Now madam CIO you are considered an imbecile by your CEO. That’s right the same guy who pressured you to deploy it because he parties with the CEO of the company that makes it and he said it never fails! “But, but, but, but you said”…..you stutter as the head of HR escorts you from the building.

New application and hardware architectures that make it easier to integrate existing applications and build composite systems from stuff already built is about as new an idea as the tie dyed bell bottoms with a 34 inch waist I have had in my closet for 30 years. I got down to a 36 during chemo and squeezed my largess into the jeans to surprise my wife. She laughed so hard she almost soiled herself. That’s when I believed I’d be OK and reminded myself not to take the CIO thing too seriously. So accounting systems became ERP systems to consolidate many good things into one bad thing. Low and behold along comes SaaS solutions to decouple the functionality so you can buy only what you need and use and you don’t have to run and maintain the crap. I think they used to call it a bulletin board service in the 1970’s? Great idea except the integration path to your other applications is non-existent. The good news is the sales folk tell me is that if you adopt a services oriented architecture and encapsulate all your other stuff as services it will only take you 3 to 5 years to complete the integration. Three out of the top four PSOs agree and are willing to take it on for only $80MM over five years. Hmmmm. One more dumb question I ask, “what if you guys go belly up?”. That’s simple the salesperson said, "I’ll go off and sell the next thing that will replace my current employer. You know I was an ERP salesperson before". The CIO is so screwed. If you like equations simply substitute ERP with CRM, HRMS, eCommerce and so on and so forth and you will end up with the same result. You’re screwed! I think it is called the associative property of IT or is it the communicative? No matter you’re screwed.

That brings me to the key attribute required by a CIO…the ugly L word. LEADERSHIP. Stay tuned for the next installment of SillyGone Valley where I will ask questions like why does it only apply to me and not you even though you created the values? Why must each CEO create their own language to do the same crap. OK, you already know the answer to that one. So they can make more millions selling their book after they are in jail, I mean retired. Why do leaders use words like ‘disingenuous' ? Isn't simply using that word not genuine? All that and more as I continue to relive my painful, but fun past with my current state solely for your enjoyment…. So long for now and take your work seriously but not yourselves.

Yours Truly,

SillyGoneValley

PS - Believe it or not I have enjoyed my career and IT...it's just so funny some times.