I am sitting here blowing bubbles in my beer, watching the foam climb the glass and collapse, and I am thinking about how the IT crowd gets treated. The pencil necks. The geeked out cave dwellers zoned into three monitors in a gray cube that smells like burnt coffee and old carpet. That is the picture in your head, isn’t it. You walk past them on the way to the good chairs and you think, look at these mole people, what do they even do all day.
Here is what they do all day. They make sure you get paid. That is the whole list, and that is also a list of one thing that contains every other thing. You do not get a paycheck without IT. You do not get a calendar invite, a payroll run, a customer record, a quote, an invoice, or a single dollar moving from a buyer’s account into yours without some tired soul keeping the machine breathing. You sent it all to the cloud, you say. You handed the keys to the nearest grifter wearing a SaaS hoodie and a pitch deck. Congratulations. You still need IT. You need someone to manage the grifter, audit the grifter, and clean up after the grifter when he gets popped and your data is on a forum somewhere being sold by the gigabyte. The cloud is just somebody else’s computer that you now have to babysit through a contract instead of a cage door.
And I do not care what business you think you are in. Mechanic. Plumber. Taxi driver. Bait shop. The work of the world runs on technology now whether you invited it or not. The plumber has a scheduling app and a payment terminal. The mechanic has diagnostic software that talks to the engine in a language the engine speaks better than the mechanic does. The cab is a phone with wheels. Technology has infested your best business practices like termites in a wet hull, and you did not notice until the deck started to give.
So why do I keep watching IT teams scrape the bottom of the barrel for budget. Why do they have to stand up in a meeting and explain, in a calm voice, why they are about to lay off a dozen good people to hit a number that some spreadsheet jockey three floors up decided was the number. AI is going to fix it, you say. AI eats spreadsheets like potato chips, I will give you that. It will chew through a financial model and spit out a chart before you finish your sentence. But you know what AI is terrible at. Dragging a dead laptop back from the land of the undead. There is no large language model on this earth that can lay hands on a machine doing the slow shuffle of zombiedom, fans screaming, screen gone the color of a drowned man, and whisper it back to life. That is a human with a screwdriver and a grudge. That is some Romero dream sequence and the only thing that fixes it is a person who has done it a thousand times and is very tired of doing it.
Yes, IT is expensive. Yes, it might be a fat slice of your budget, and yes, I know, you did not get into this game to run a data center. You wanted to sell parts or fix planes or move freight. Tough. You are a shambling corpse of an argument if you think you can ignore the thing that holds the whole operation upright. Ignoring IT does not make it cheaper. It makes it a liability with a fuse on it.
And before we go further, get one thing straight, because you keep getting it wrong. The CISO is not IT. He is not the GRC binder. He is not the IT security team, and for the love of all that is holy he is not some warm body you tapped on the shoulder one Tuesday and said, congratulations, you’re the security guy now, and then expected to come out the other end with anything resembling success. Those are three different animals and you keep feeding them out of the same bowl. IT makes the business run. That is their whole sworn purpose, and despite your budget garrote and your cute little theology about cost effectiveness that never once considers ROI unless it is some shiny new toy you already wanted, they will find a way to get stuff done. They always do. They duct tape the thing together and keep the lights on while you complain about the electric bill.
The CISO is not that man. He is not there to make it run. He is the regulator. The governor on the engine that keeps the whole machine from flying apart at the seams. He is Gandalf the Gray planted in the middle of the bridge with the staff down, telling you, you shall not pass, while something with horns and a whip of fire comes up out of the dark. And here is the difference between him and the trembling hobbits. The hobbits get carried. You are not carrying him. You are throwing day-old rancid pub subs at the back of his head and telling him to quit blocking the bridge and let the monster through, because the monster is on a tight schedule and the monster polled well with the board.
Now let me pour out the rest of this beer on the guy you really treat like dirt. The one in the CISO office. The red headed step child of the executive floor. You never invite him to the strategic meetings because he makes you itch. He sits there and looks straight through your buzzword bingo, your synergies and your north stars and your value-add ecosystems, and he asks the one question nobody else in the room has the spine to ask. He says, in that flat voice, what exactly is the Attorney General of East Bimbojailtoo going to say when we do this patently illegal thing you just proposed. And the room goes quiet because nobody had thought past the bonus.
Yeah. That guy. You do not call him to the bar after work. You do not loop him into the fun parts. And here is the joke you are too dense to laugh at. He does not care. He understands the math better than you do. If he is not in the room, he is not implicated in the room. His private attorney is on speed dial and the dial is warm. He watches you build the gallows and he just tells you, in that same flat voice, that roughly nine point nine repeating out of ten people die from hanging when the gallows works as designed. Then he writes the number down, notes the date, notes who nodded along, and steps back. His footprints are not on the lumber because the minutes show he read you the odds and you picked up the hammer anyway.
And here is the part you never bothered to learn about the man. He is motivated by exactly one thing. Reduce risk to the company. That is the whole engine. Not his bonus, not his title, not whether you like the font on slide nine. Risk down. That is it. And he knows something you keep forgetting, which is that he cannot accept risk on your behalf and he has never once tried to. That is not his job and it was never his job. Only two parties in this whole circus can accept risk for the company, and that is the CEO and the board. The COO might act on it. The general counsel might defend it. The CFO might pay for it when the bill comes due. But the CEO and the board are the only ones who get to look at a danger and say, we will live with that. The CISO does not accept it. He tracks it. He maps it. He stands in the doorway with a flashlight and shows you exactly where the rot is, and then he writes down who was standing there when the decision got made. He is aware of every choice and he is on record about all of them.
So when you ignore him, and the thing he warned about comes through the wall like a freight train, guess whose nameplate gets pulled off the door. His. You will fire the one guy who told you the truth, and you will dress it up in the language of management. You will say he should have explained it better. He should have been nicer about it. Neater. He should have used a cleaner deck, a warmer tone, a better font. As if the freight train cares about kerning. As if the breach reads the slide and says, well, the typography was off, I will come back never. You did not get burned because he communicated poorly. You got burned because you did not want to hear it, and shooting the messenger is cheaper than admitting you nodded off in the meeting where he said it plainly.
And you. You forgot to add him to the directors and officers insurance rider, didn’t you. The one human in the building who knows every secret, every breach you buried, every shortcut you took with somebody’s data, the man who has held his tongue and sent you three terse emails when he could have sent a memo that ended careers. You left him off the rider. You left the guy with all the secrets and none of the cover standing outside in the cold while you handed plush coverage to people who could not spell the company’s own compliance obligations.
That man should be on your Christmas card list. He should be on the short list for the good chair. He is not an also-ran in your little executive drone race. He is the reason there is still a company to run the race in.
So here is where I land, glass empty, foam dried to a ring. You cannot do the job without IT, no matter what the deck says. And the guy who keeps you out of an orange jumpsuit is treated like he came in through the service entrance. Fix that. Or don’t, and find out.
I think I need a few of those fried jalapeno chips. Something has to cut the taste of all this.
About the Author
