CIO DESPERADO

The IT Analyst plays an invaluable roll in ensuring IT business initiatives are on-course and completed within the given pre-defined parameters. There is an apparent gap in understanding between many IT professionals and Business leaders, simply because the experience and objectives of both parties are so vastly different. Gartner conducted a survey in 2012 with 220 CEO’s around the world regarding the role of a CIO in the organization. Mark Raskino, a VP at Gartner told us “the results showed CIOs were rarely seen as the masters of innovation management within the company by the CEO, nor were they thought of as strategy partners.” This is difficult to stomach when businesses foresee increasing their IT budgets over the coming year. Mark continued on why CIO’s aren’t considered as imperative to the core function of business: “CIOs appear to be failing in the eyes of CEOs in terms of alignment with the rest of the business. The research showed the stereotype of the head of IT being too preoccupied with technical issues to be effective business leaders persists. He said they were perceived as unable to bring a breadth of business perspective to the table.”

Seeing this issue is interesting and shows a place where IT analysts really need to be strategically positioned within an organization to climb corporate ladders to the CIO role, or equivalent. Executive level officers(read CIOs) need to be more concerned with the bottom line, and less concerned with the finer details of how technologies are executed. Because Analysts are concerned with both aspects of business and technology, their skillset is perfectly aligned to work towards to this role.

Shoretel hosted VoIP. Our organization made the swap to Shoretel in a huge building relocation that took place about a month ago. We had to move to accommodate our growth, and in that, we’d outgrown an old Panasonic hybrid IP PBX system. Enter - VoIP.

I researched a number of different hosted VoIP providers, the option to host VoIP services internally, as well as a myriad of other opportunities. The most cumulatively beneficial decision based on our business needs was to go with a hosted system, and Shoretel’s reputation beat out the competition by a landslide.

The migration was relatively painless, everything swapped on time, and the system voice quality has been great. Support is generally helpful, and our overall experience is 85-90%. Late yesterday afternoon our phones started acting up. Unable to dial internal extensions, unable to access call history/voicemail, etc... I kept my finger on the heartbeat of the issue overnight, and early in the AM I’d noticed that our service hadn’t been restored yet. I have a Shoretel phone at home, so I tested the system first thing when I woke up.

Upon finding this I had to shoot out an all-employee email notifying the organization that our phones would not be operational until further notice. An email from all three of the execs I knew would have issue - CEO/COO/CTO - and I knew my credibility was on the line. This is where my “Trust” in Shoretel becomes thin. 

How do you offer a hosted voice service, with commitment with to a 99.9% up-time target, without having some kind of fail over for catastrophic outage like this? All of your Connect clients were reported to be down by a support rep I spoke with, and our business was without phones from basically 4PM-10AM next day. Internally we’ve taken measures to combat ISP outages, and have provided three connections for our VoIP traffic to run off of.

/endrant

In my decade of IT experience I’ve had many wonderful opportunities to grow and further my career. In that journey I’ve relied on the wisdom, trials, and tribulations of those who took this journey both long, and shortly before me. I’ve gathered much information in person, and while endlessly scouring for information online on community forums, blogs, and Twitter feeds... 

I’ve felt for a long time that my natural progression would be to start sharing my own professional journeys, both old and new, so that others can benefit from my accumulated experience. I’ll also occasionally use this as a forum to vent about my personal-professional trials, but I’ll keep whining to a minimum. I promise.

I hope this blog sheds light where there is darkness for my fellow IT professionals ranking up their own careers. Please feel free to reach out or share insight on any topics either discussed, or not discussed on this blog!

Thanks much,