November 01, 2006 — CIO — Those cute little ghoulies, ghosties and goblins have come and gone, leaving behind only sticky doorbells and their icky chocolate fingerprints. Your own kids have emptied their candy bags and are now sleeping off their annual sugar benders. But as you hit the sack after another Halloween, what workplace horrors will visit you in the still of the night? And when you return to work, what fantastic beasts will await to fright your day?

You may encounter...

Beasts of the C-Suite
Sometimes they call themselves your peers but suddenly, without warning, they can turn into boardroom behemoths, terrifying bottom-line bullies demanding that you demonstrate the value of that sweet new system you’ve just rolled out.

Hackeri Horribilli
They’re out there, waiting to smash through your firewall and all your carefully crafted security. Some species of Hackeri Horribilli are kids, out for fun. Others are mobsters, out for a score.

The Mandate Vampires
Blood-sucking regulators who descend on your enterprise in order to feed and fatten off your ever-dwindling IT budget.

Master CFO
Gimlet-eyed, an abacus where his heart should be, Master CFO first reduces all your hopes and dreams, your plots and schemes, to figures on a spreadsheet and then wraps you in said spreadsheet so tightly you...just...can’t...breathe.

The ROI-Sucking Serpent
This terrifying reptile is a shape-shifter. Sometimes it appears as a deceptively harmless project overrun; sometimes as a Brobdignagian application backlog; sometimes an upgrade; sometimes a new licensing fee. Whatever form it takes, its poison is deadly to CIOs.

Data of the Undead
You thought you deleted that compromising e-mail. But, no, it can never be purged. And it will return to haunt you—followed closely by all-too-real SEC investigators.

The Stakeholder Hydra
A many-headed creature, each head demands action (immediately!) on yet another functionality that (it hisses) is absssolutely mission critical. The Hydra rips projects apart and devours them right before the CIO’s horrified eyes.

The Streaming Video Succubus
Why are your service levels declining? Why is your WAN clogged? Why (for heaven’s sake) isn’t anybody working? It’s the seductive Streaming Video Succubus, absorbing your bandwidth and bringing everything to a grinding halt while your employees’ eyes glaze over. How can it be exorcised? No one knows.

Swarming Locusts of Spam
They devour server space, not to mention your staff’s time. These are one of the seven signs of the end of the enterprise. Be afraid, be very afraid.

 

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