Whac-a-mole. It’s my favorite of all metaphors, at least when it comes to applicability to IT. For those who don’t know the background: Whac-a-mole is a commonly seen arcade game, where plastic moles pop up at random through holes in the game panel. The job of the player, of course, is to pound them down again with a mallet, accumulating points with each kinetic, mind-clearing, vigorous whack. And, of course, the game keeps speeding up. The moles never stop coming.
Any readers who don’t instantly get the clear analogy to IT are probably reading the wrong blog.
A career spent in IT feels like a constant bout of Whac-a-mole. But here, again, is one key recurring “mole” that I find especially irritating: the proliferation, against all logic, of articles and tweets about the demise of IT, the death of the CIO, and how technology is now so easy, so omnipresent, that experts are no longer required.
I wrote about this ever-repeated meme a year ago in a post titled “IT consumerization, the cloud, and the alleged death of the CIO”. I railed against the meme, pointing out that “this frequent linking of cloud and IT consumerization to the looming demise of the CIO and IT is not just misguided, but actually gets it completely backwards. In fact, I argue that IT consumerization and the cloud will actually elevate the importance of IT within a company, as both a service and a strategic focus.”
But IT moribundity is a meme that somehow refuses to, uh, die.
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It’s a universal trait, it seems: we all want to be understood, want the world to see things through our eyes, want to watch the “aha” light go on when people finally realize just how tough we have it and how magnificently we still prevail.
IT people, and senior technology executives in particular, are anything but exceptions to this longing. In fact, it seems that very few other disciplines have to put up with a constant stream of articles and books questioning our very existence, approaches, purpose, and worth (Does IT Matter?, the death of the CIO , etc.). Even the acronym CIO is commonly and gleefully referred to as standing for “Career Is Over”. And you want a downer? Just try googling “average tenure of the CIO”.
A person could downright get a complex here. No one seems to get it! No one understands how tough a job this is! No one seems to perceive the “damned if we do, damned if we don’t” intrinsic nature of our role. I present this syndrome with all due humor (“against the assault of laughter nothing can stand”, said Mark Twain), but I also mean it: is it utter masochism that leads us to choose this “whipping boy” kind of career at this level?
That’s why it’s so welcome when a book comes along that effectively presents insight and understanding into the “big picture” struggles of today’s CIO, even combined with empathy and warmth. Martha Heller’s The CIO Paradox: Battling the Contradictions of IT Leadership, just out late last year, brims with “been there seen that” deep insight into many of the standard CIO predicaments.
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