![]() The CIO, in my fictionalized scenario, knows that that is a sinkhole. Perhaps the CFO says that he or she will only consider a move to the cloud if there’s a detailed ROI justification, with cost details and projections, a Monte Carlo simulation of different scenarios, inclusive of the cost of Red Bull for the engineers, estimated to five decimal points of a cent. And I’ll refer again to the discussion that takes place between the CIO and CFO, that villain with check-signing authority. I’ll use the example, again, of the decision to start migrating to the cloud, because that’s the decision I often encounter CIOs facing. And that is to make a principled argument and try to influence the other CXOs. There’s a third alternative, much better in my opinion. OK, this is a stereotype, perhaps no longer valid-but I’ve seen it. It seems like CIOs have two typical ways of responding to disagreement from other senior leaders: (1) they cower and drop the idea, taking the disagreement as a veto, or (2) they passive-aggressively insist on their right to make IT decisions and then see if they can mystify their colleagues with lots of technical jargon. For the rest of this blog post, let’s all be New Yorkers. But please bear with me as I discuss the principles, and then you can figure out the best way to adapt them to your cultural context. I understand that if you’re, say, in a Japanese company, over-the-top demonstrations of gutsy disagreement might not be productive. Some of the things I’m about to say are likely to be culture-dependent. I’m an American-worse than that, a New Yorker-and I work in an American environment. In this post I’d like to discuss taking a principled stand within the organization. BACKBONE DEFINITION SERIESIn the previous two posts in this series I’ve written about the guts to make a decision when the time is right, and the guts to demand that your vendors treat you like a valued customer. I’m not suggesting that you become an annoying pain-in-the-electrons, but if you’re thoroughly convinced-based on your expertise in the subject-that you’re right, then you have an obligation to your company to disagree and state your case. Wait a minute! Just because the CFO vetoes an idea doesn’t mean the conversation’s over. Maybe it’s not about the cloud-perhaps you’ve found a way to use quantum computing to better satisfy your customers, but the CFO won’t allocate the money you need for a particle accelerator. Or perhaps the CEO doesn’t think it’s a priority right now, or the board of directors has heard a rumor that there may be security issues in the cloud. But the CFO says no, it’s too risky, or the economic projections aren’t convincing. Perhaps you’re a CIO, who knows perfectly well that the cloud will have tremendous benefit for your company. If a network backbone goes down your Internet connection speed can be drastically reduced or may not even be able to get to certain places in the world.Sometimes, other leaders in your company reject your ideas. Without a network backbone, you would need to pass through dozens or even hundreds of different computer's and routers to access the computer storing what you need. The color purple represents zero bytes of data, and the white represents 100 billion bytes of data. This picture is of the NSFNET T1 backbone and the volume of traffic going over that network backbone for the month of September 1991. The image above, created by Donna Cox and Robert Patterson of the NCSA, is a visual representation of an Internet backbone in the United States. In the United States, many of these backbones are run by telecommunication companies such as AT&T, Bell South, Congent, Qwest, Level 3, MCI/Worldcom, Sprint, and Time Warner. The first Internet backbone was between UCLA and SLI on October 29, 1969, and today the Internet consists of several large backbones that carry the majority of traffic throughout the world. The backbone often connects large networks or companies together. A portion of a computer network that is capable of carrying the majority of traffic on the network at high speeds. ![]()
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