Hi all,

So my boss just left this friday for a new job.

So we (15 people) will be without a CIO for the next 3-4 months, since upper management needs to find a replacement and they dont expect the new person to arrive before november.

I am kind of excited about the whole thing of getting a new boss, since even tho we worked together for 9 years, we did not exactly get on that well.

Thankfully im a excellent badass IT guy, so he didnt want to fire me :wink:

But it ofcause leaves the possibility i might end up needing to look for a new job (ive been in the company for 15 years), from what i hear its not uncommon that a new CIO has his own people who he wants to run the joint.

Anyhow for now, 3-4 months without micromanagement from my old boss. Wooo!

The CFO of the company has taken the reigns, and will apparently check in on us once a week.

96 Spice ups

If your old boss thought you were a pretty good tech, I’m thinking the new one will as well, I wouldn’t worry too much. Might be an opportunity for you.

48 Spice ups

You’ll be fine. While CIOs do bring in their own crews with them - they don’t fire people to bring their own. They will usually fill anyone who won’t accept the new regime that leaves of their own accord.

14 Spice ups

It’ll probably work out fine. New boss might be great, you never know. I would file this under, “Do No Create Problems That Do No Exist”.

The new boss would not bring in their minions right off the bat anyway. They would get to know the place a bit then ask everyone to document everything they know. Then start replacing the old employees a few at a time with their own ringers.

Either that or outsource the whole department. You’ll know if your badge stops working. :slight_smile: Just kidding, in most situations I bet the new CIO is hoping all of you will stay and keep the place running.

10 Spice ups

Is it a 15 person IT dept or a 15 person company? I don’t think a CIO will can you unless you are the fat in the 15 person IT dept.

5 Spice ups

Finance people are report-centric.

Have a report sent along a day in advance to best use the once-a-week check in. Adjust technical level accordingly.

38 Spice ups

As Holo said, most CIOs will come in and may have a few old team members they might like to bring along, but there are a lot of factors to consider - does the old guy wanna leave? Does he fit the new company?

Plus you are already there, know the environment and have a proven track record where you are. Unless you have a real issue between you or screw up big time (not likely), you should be good to go…

5 Spice ups

No the company is like… 1200 people.

we have 4 1st line (one mostly dedicated to procurement of items and tablet/iphone service)

1 teamlead who does a bit of 2nd line

2 IP phone (Lync)

2 Sysadmins (me and a collegue, we do all infrastructure work, and secondline)

1 DBA

2 Education people (we do full service, including courses for employees in day-to-day tasks)

and 1 PL/SQL programmer and a assistant (who mainly supports business processes with regards to our CRM)

We provide full service, so even if a board member has trouble with a tablet at home, we drive to his house, and fix it. 9-10k service requests are logged a year.

15 Spice ups

I lived through the turnover of a new CIO. Those of us(technicians) with technical skills were fine. But not so for the managers who were previous political(who you know) hires and managers who had not kept their IT skills. They were pushed out the door.

Then that CIO left a few years later to likely do similar hatchet work somewhere else.

New CIOs like to bring in new managers who will feel indebted to them, and thus easier to control.

8 Spice ups

1200 people requires 4 people to handle handing out and servicing devices? Are you located on 4 continents or something? I know companies with half that bench who run 2000 users. Standardization, support contracts, and contractor networks with spare equipment can lower this ratio generally.

This is fairly crazy unless you guys are highly complicated call center (in which case as much as I love Lync I’d argue you have the wrong platform). Lync is all about automated provisioning. I have a customer with ~2K users with Lync and they have no dedicated Lync guys (The existing 2 sysadmins handle it on top of normal duties) and they outsource all new location provisioning to us (maybe a few hours a month of remote support).

That is about fair for that size (although industry by industry I’ve seen it more or less, its really how IT dependent you are (and this is true about all the roles).

I’m guessing this person is a ERP application etc person, because there is really no way a 1200 man company would needed a dedicated DBA. Even then for this type of roll your generally better off paying a highly skilled contractor for short periods of time to setup new reports etc, or buy software to layer on your solution and enable more dirrect access by the finance etc people.

Generally when I see a CRM dev on a shop this small its (90% of the time) someone should have bought a better CRM platform (SalesForce etc) and you are arbitraging proper licensing for a salary that’s not weiged against (and end up getting less). Sometimes people have highly special niche needs (although then, you should be extending an existing high end CRM system not building your own).

almost 8 service requests per person sounds ridiculously high. Then again, white glove service for users is expensive.

7 Spice ups

I had a previous position with about 6 of us in IT. About 18 months in and the IT manager was kind of forced to resign and being replaced with someone younger. The old boss was easy going and good to get along with, the new manager turned out to be even better, was fun and very smart (had created a video game on xBox live) a great developer as well as technical. He had vision where the old boss had been there for over 20 years and kind have lost direction. So in that case it was great. I felt for the old boss as he was a great guy and would defend him if anyone tried to bag him out while he was gone.

4 Spice ups

You’re the new Boss…

11 Spice ups

At my last job, we went through 3 CIOs. There was no firing to stack the department with their people, only the making up of new positions for said people.

Every single one of them either quit or was fired within a few months of starting. Every single one of them, it couldn’t have happened soon enough.

4 Spice ups

Like Technical Angel, I went through a few CIOs too.

Started with one, he left and was replaced by his second-in-command. In fact during my interview the replacement was asking the questions, while the person in charge was suggesting what questions to ask so it was a bit of a weird interview. Then the next one left and management for the IT department was handed up a level to someone who just barely had knowledge of IT, that person left and we were left with a team leader rather than a manager. Then we got another manager, IT was shifted under Finance, IT was deemed worthy of outsourcing, the IT manager was terminated and replaced by a business manager reporting to the CFO who is carrying on the outsourcing process.

Needless to say while I technically have a manager, it’s a caretaker in reality and I’m looking for the next place to enhance my skills.

4 Spice ups

Looks like you have 3-4 months to become the CIO, get in there!

13 Spice ups

Hi John,

Im gonna pick up on your post, just because i think we live in completly different part of the IT ecosystem and World.

I actually think we are a bit on the low side with regards to 1st line support, they handle all incoming calls/mails and deliver support to all our 1200 users, who are located in about 180 remote locations. I know the teamleader of the support guys do around 60-70 Requests for Service a week just to keep us afloat (we can discuss why he is doing this, instead of highlighting the issue, but thats another talk)

I totally agree, it would be nice if that was the case, Im not a big Lync fan, but the business requirement for changes to lync infrastructure is apparently very high, plus we are starting to roll out the installation to our remote offices, as one of the sysadmins your talking about should handle it, i say no thank you :slight_smile: I have a busy day enough as it is, and i cant see me deliver any satisfactory service on the lync platform…

Well, he handles both our Oracle and SQL database installations, we have quite a few, and he helps with integration into weblogic, he does not do reports etc, thats the developers job. We are looking into migrating our CRM system to something that is not entirely made by ourselves, but we are in a niche business with no or little mainstream applications that suit our business needs.

I agree, but the descion was made oh… about 15 years ago, and we’ve been building and supporting ever since, we are looking into something a bit more standardised to be implemented in 2016 :slight_smile: We used to have 3 developers inhouse for the solution, but two were canned when the decsion was made (maybe not the right time to do it but… )

It is, the expectations are super high for service, and we are doing our best to deliver!

BTW, how does one do the quoting thing properly? it puts every remark into its own box?

4 Spice ups

You will be fine, I have gone through 4 CIOs , 3 IT Directors and an IT manager in my 7 years at my current firm. If you’re good at what you do , you should n’t have any dramas.

2 Spice ups

A question I want to ask is why aren’t you able to take the position of CIO? Seems like a great place to move up in the ranks if you’ve been there for so many years.

2 Spice ups

new boss could = new opportunities. maybe you should apply for the boss job?

4 Spice ups

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

11 Spice ups