Even More Tales of Technology Terror: Personal Stories of Tech Disaster

From earthquakes to worldwide email disruption to business processes that won't stay dead, we round up personal tales of IT terror.

By CIO Staff
Sat, October 27, 2007

Page 7

"What's His Name"

Earlier in his career, Cognos CIO Claudio Silvestri experienced a classic horror story moment: stage fright during a major presentation in front of his new boss. It doesn't get much scarier than that.

While working as a junior executive at a large multi-national IT hardware manufacturer, we were working on an Oracle Financials implementation and just wrapping up the testing phase when the company replaced its CIO.

The prior CIO was very much in favor of a distributed IT model; however, as you might guess, the new CIO was very much in favor of a centralized model. The project was stopped and new direction set to implement SAP in a highly centralized manner.

In order to respond quickly, I hired a very large and reputable consulting and system integration company. We spent the next two months recalibrating and putting together our plans. After a very intense period, we were set to present the new direction to our executive management and the new CIO. It was going to be quite a show, with people from around the world set to hear from me on the plan to move forward.

With the worldwide teams gathered in a large auditorium and me up front behind a podium, I began my presentation. I started by introducing everyone involved and thanking them for the tremendous effort over the prior weeks to prepare what we believed was a winning plan to adjust to the new approach. The senior Partner from our SI was seated directly to my left, and so I started with him.

As I turned to introduce him, my horror story began: I could not for the life of me remember his name. After many weeks of working very closely with this person, through some intense and energetic dialog and more than a few beers at a local establishment, I simply drew a complete blank and could not remember his name. I'm sure I must have looked stunned on stage to all in the audience and to our new CIO, who was sitting front and center.

The Partner, being much more polished than I, realized my predicament. He simply came up to the podium and introduced himself as "John Doe". This got a laugh, broke the tension, and turned the situation completely around. The plan was well received after a scary start.

Next: The IT Man Cometh…Thankfully

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