Let's Vent

Because sometimes you just have to let off steam

By Michael Friedenberg
Sun, September 14, 2008

CIO — I love commercials and am not embarrassed to admit it. This isn't only because my livelihood depends on advertising—I truly enjoy seeing a well-produced commercial or ad. In fact, if the Philadelphia Eagles aren't in the Super Bowl (and they rarely are), I get more excited about the commercials than about the game.

The other day I saw a terrific ad. A husband and wife are together, and a friend calls asking the man to come over because he needs to "vent." His wife is so touched by this sentimental outreach that she lets him go. Unbeknownst to her, venting means sharing a Coors Light with his buddy using Coors's newly designed can.

Very funny, but it also got me thinking about the positions we hold and our inability to vent from time to time because of where we sit. We can't vent upwards because our peer executives don't want to hear it, and we can't vent to our team because that would be poor judgment and leadership. So who can we vent to?

Well, I am inviting you over to vent. Why don't I start:

Budget planning: Can't stand it, and it never goes as planned. There's got to be a better way.

Product names that don't mean a thing to the common man.

Air travel: Has it really come to this?

Airline security: Do you feel more secure?

Golf: Why can't we hit a stationary object straight?

Vendors and golf: Do they really think that a golf invitation is the only way to get our time or attention?

The economy: We can't control it, so let's just adjust to what it is giving us.

IT complexity: Vendors make a ton of money off it. Do you think they really want to give us something that isn't complex?

Apple's iPhone: Now it is our responsibility to support whatever the end user purchases?

Gen Y: Yes, you're smart, intelligent, driven and technologically astute, but could you wait three months before asking for your next promotion?

Tell your spouse you'll be home soon; we have more venting to do. Send me your best vent. The winner will get free admittance to our upcoming CIO Year Ahead Conference, Nov. 9-11, 2008.

You are here: Business/Management Topics » Careers » CEO Letter

Most Recent Careers Stories

White Papers »

Top Solutions and Tools to Prevent Devastating Malware

Custom malware frequently goes undetected. According to Forrester Research, the best way to reduce risk of breach is to deploy file integrity monitoring (FIM) tools that provide immediate alerts. This white paper has been brought to you by NetIQ, the leader in solving complex IT challenges.

Identity Governance: The Business Imperatives

This white paper describes the business challenges and opportunities that are driving interest in Identity Governance while discussing considerations your organization should make to help achieve project success.

CA Technology Brief: CA Point of View: Content Aware Identity & Access Management

This paper explores the concept of content-aware IAM, describes the integrated architecture for this new approach, and highlights the benefits that this approach provides.

Measuring the Business Value of CI in the Data Center - IDC-HP White Paper

One of the key strategies that IT teams are pursuing to reduce capital costs while boosting asset utilization and employee productivity is the transition to highly virtualized data centers. However, IDC finds that expectations for further boosts in IT asset use and operational efficiency often surpass the actual results for a variety of reasons. These problems can quickly overwhelm any hoped-for benefits as the scope of virtual server deployment expands.

Accelerate time to application value

For your IT organization to keep pace with the business, you need a new, faster approach to infrastructure deployment-an approach that increases agility and accelerates time to application value. That's HP Converged Systems. Built on Converged Infrastructure, these systems deliver the industry's first portfolio of pre-integrated, tested, and optimized infrastructure solutions for applications running in virtual, cloud, dedicated, or hybrid environments.

Business Value of Blade

The nature of the blade platform makes system management, monitoring and provisioning easy and efficient. Access this resource to learn how blade migration will save your data center time and money while increasing performance.

Webcasts »

Apps QuickStart Series Part 2: Designing and Deploying SQL Server on VMware vSphere

Download this webcast to learn about the design considerations for virtualizing SQL workloads, performance and scalability information and high-availability options, as well as support considerations

Quantifying the Business Value of VMware View - Webcast

Many enterprises have discovered that the use of virtualization to support desktop workloads creates a range of significant benefits. These benefits include price efficiencies, improved IT management and greater agility and choice for end users.

This VMware sponsored webcast with IDC will provide both quantitative measurement of the business value -- defined as the expected ROI -- and qualitative analysis associated with the use of VMware View™. IDC will also provide an analysis of the View Composer and ThinApp™ features of VMware View, including the business value of these solutions and an overview of how they work.

Attend this webcast to learn about:
- Challenges and barriers that might impede the adoption of desktop virtualization
- Navigating roadblocks to facilitate a strategic implementation
- Optimizing qualitative and quantitative benefits to IT and your business

Architecting a Modern Approach to Data Management

Applications are changing - they're increasingly web-oriented, global in nature and run from multiple device types. Additionally, the volume of data is growing exponentially every year. How do you ensure your applications have fast, accurate, up-to-date information in this new world? Modern applications are data-intensive; delivering data the old way using monolithic databases isn't working. What's needed is a modern approach to data. One that scales-out as needed and delivers predictable high performance, but without sacrificing data consistency or integrity.

Introduction to VMware View 5

VMware View™ 5 simplifies IT management while increasing end user freedom by delivering desktop services from your cloud. Building upon VMware's leadership in desktop virtualization, VMware View 5 delivers a high-performance user experience while giving IT greater policy control.

View this webcast and find out how VMware View 5 can help you:
- Deliver the highest fidelity experience of desktop services across any device and any network
- Simplify and automate IT management, security and control of desktop services
- Reduce the costs associated with your desktop environment

The CIO's View: Time-to-Value Through Automation

IT professionals are being asked to deliver faster "time-to-value" than ever before. An IDG Research survey found that CIOs are eager to invest in technologies that will enable them to get new applications and services up quickly, achieving faster time-to-value.

5 Steps to Successful IT Consolidation

Learn how to reduce IT management overhead, ease revision control, guarantee data security, scale systems more quickly and reduce server and software costs.

Newsletter Sign-Up »

Receive the latest news test, reviews and trends on your favorite technology topics

Choose a newsletter