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A little known American poet, Delmore Schwartz once noted famously that “Even paranoids have real enemies.”
Certainly, CIOs are subject to paranoia, especially these days when job security is a rarity. In fact, any IT chief who doesn’t look over his shoulder from time to time is either blissfully naive or has compromising photos of his firm’s CEO hidden away in some vault.
Often, CIOs have good cause to indulge in a little nail-biting. It’s always reassuring when your CEO hires a high-powered IT consultancy to assess how effectively your department is being run. You can pretty much bet that some consultant who is pulling down seven figure daily draw isn’t going to give your operation a clean bill of health no matter how marvelously you do your job. Besides, the very fact that your boss sought an outside perspective is not exactly reassuring.
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Then there’s all this new technology that CIOs are somehow supposed to manage and convert into ROI generators for the company: employees jabbering away incessantly on Facebook or Twitter; virtualization, cloud computing. If someone told you a few years ago that a big part of your job would be releasing all your corporate information into the Internet ether and then managing these dispersed clouds to make rain, you’d have probably done some more sensible with your life.
Another sure paranoid maker is the line of business head who brings in a new technology and then informs IT about it after the fact. That worked well with CRM software. It only took 15 years or so for the CRM apps to be intergrated into the corporate database, but, hey, that’s why you get the big bucks, right,
Of course, at times it’s important, critical actually, for the CIO to be paranoid. If you’re dealing with IT security, risk, spyware, hackers, malware, data loss, breaches and god knows what else, you need to be on high alert and prepared for the worst 24 hours a day. Your CEO wouldn’t want it any other way.
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