Are you going up or downstairs?

Yesterday, when I entered the lift, a colleague asked me whether I was bound ‘downstairs’, to the basement where the data center lies, or ‘upstairs’ where the CEO reigns, along with Finance and Sales. My office as Central Information Officer lies in the intermediate floor along with Administration. Operations and Marketing.

"Which floor are you going to?", he asked me.

Working in a medium-size enterprise, my job description as Central Information Officer isn’t set in the stone, could be interpreted, as happens with classical music scores. Having paid my dues, I used to interpret my role it in a conservative way, trying to rein in expenses and doing more with less. Whenever a consultant or a salesman tries to get me to buy new technologies or to adopt new approaches, my answers sound like: “I would love it, but it’s outside my budget”.

My motto is “just say no” also when colleagues ask for something that couldn’t be done with our software and hardware legacy. “It will take too long”, I answer, or “let’s try to make do with our current IT resources instead!”.

Michael, 45 years old CIO in an Industrial PME is the – not so fictional – reader of the contents that in the next months we’d like to share in order to explain the potential that cloud computing opens to a company.