Book Excerpt: The Adventures of an IT Leader, Part 4
A new CIO works to restore his credibility, and that of his team, after a confrontation with his CEO. Read the final installment of our exclusive series.
Wed, March 11, 2009
CIO — The story so far: Jim Barton, the head of loan operations for financial services company IVK, has been tapped as the CIO by the company's new CEO, Carl Williams. The previous CIO has been fired, and Barton must restore Williams's confidence in IT while he learns on the job. In his previous role, Barton had argued against a security upgrade. After an apparent data breach that may have compromised customer information, Barton has narrowly escaped being fired. And his IT department is under extra scrutiny by the company's leadership team. Read the first, second and third installment.
Wednesday, August 8, 9:38 a.m....
Jim Barton slammed his office door and slapped a notepad hard onto the desk. "Why," he asked of no one in particular, "does every interaction with those guys have to be like a trip to the dentist?"
The leadership team meeting had just broken up. Much of it had to do with IT. Most of that had amounted to listening to people complain. Since the security event in June, people seemed less willing to assume that Barton and the IT group were doing things for good reasons.
He needed to turn his attention to the final item that had come up in the meeting: Web 2.0. Bernie Ruben, director of the IT department's Technical Services Group, had forwarded him an e-mail on the subject a couple of days before.
Barton located Ruben's e-mail and clicked on the attachment. He found his way to the bottom of the report, which listed some of the people within IVK who were participating in the so-called "Web 2.0 revolution." Some items in the list were links to blogs. Barton clicked on one and found himself reading about one guy's experiences working in the customer support center at IVK.
To his dismay, there was a description of a day when the systems at IVK went down. The author even speculated, jokingly, about the cause of the outage; his lighthearted list included viruses and hackers.
"You've got to be kidding!" Barton cried out before he stood and went storming down the hall in search of answers.
Tuesday, August 14, 11:35 a.m....
"Three questions," said Ruben. "One: What should we do about this blog entry?"
"Nothing," said Raj Juvvani, director of customer support and collection systems.
Ruben nodded and continued: "Two: What should be our policy about blogging on inside information from within the company?"
