The CIO Who Admitted Too Much - ' The Truth Will '

Shortly after the letter leaked, much to the displeasure of Schwegman, he said that a lot of the memo was simplified because he was writing "to a bunch of non-technical people," and that simplifications may have been misleading.

That letter was written a few weeks ago and the Oracle major upgrade that he was dreading has been completed, Schwegman said, and his worst fears were not realized. Thus far, he said, it has been been "a huge success."

I find this incident fascinating in the way that it illustrates the communication challenges that a CIO has to deal with, especially when one's employer is publicly held.

Technology veterans are, by nature, pessimistic. Present any detailed plan to an engineer and the engineer will quickly project every way it could glitch and start figuring out ways to prevent that glitch.

It's like the mentality bred with the new homeland security approach. Law enforcement agents are supposed to be creative and anticipate any way that terrorists could strike.

IT directors and CIOs must often have the same mental approach. After all, who other than them will be able to anticipate problems when two wonderful programs suddenly decide to conflict?

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CEOs, COOs and CMOs (chief marketing officers) are the opposite.

In the same way the CIO can be considered the ultimate programmer (the best programmer would care about business objectives and design accordingly), the CEO, COO and CMO are the ultimate salespeople.

A good salesperson is genetically disposed to optimism in the same way that a good programmer is disposed to pessimism.

The conflict comes when those communications go external.

Schwegman is not only the CIO, but he's also a senior vice president. Partners interpret senior executive comments in a certain way and the kind of raw candor that Schwegman's letter used can be, to say the least, discomforting.

So when IT projects go astray, should a CIO publicly fall on his sword?

I'm envisioning the original "Saturday Night Live" shows and can see John Belushi as Samurai CIO. (Personally, I'd have paid good money to watch a "Samurai CIO Gets Angry At The Bad Product Demo" skit.)

I might feel differently if the confessional correspondence had suggested specific things the partners could have done to protect themselves.

As it was, the letter pretty much came down to: Bad things have happened and worse things are probably going to happen. Sorry about that. Carry on.

As comedian Robert Klein said about the air raid drills at his elementary school, the message the children took away was, "the siren means disaster. It's too horrible to think about. Don't even try to save yourselves." And then, "they had the wisdom to sound a siren every day at noon."

Non-technical partners rarely want the unvarnished truth when it comes to technology projects.

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They want to know that their problems are being heard, but they also want to hear that responsible adults are taking care of the matter and that all will be fine.

In the true tradition of Dilbert, CIOs tend to be honest to a fault and to volunteer problems and possible problems.

When communicating externally, it's probably best to curb those tendencies.

As our elected officials say: Honesty is a powerful concept. Use it only as a last resort.

Evan Schuman is retail editor for Ziff Davis Internet's Enterprise Edit group. He has tracked high-tech issues since 1987, has been opinionated long before that and doesn't plan to stop anytime soon. He can be reached at Evan_Schuman@ziffdavis.com.