How To Talk Like a CIO

itwbennett writes "Today's CIOs speak business-buzzwords as a second language. And there's a good reason for that. There is a trend among CIOs to distance themselves from being regarded as technologists and to put themselves forward as business strategists. It boils down to one simple rule: Just as you should never be the first to mention compensation in the interview process, you should never be the first to break out the tech jargon in a business setting."

Comments

if you think my karma was bad before

[nopainogain]

Today, I went to the EMC/VMware event in Baltimore. me, twentysome 50-60 year old C-levels, no technical information that could be gleaned, but a bunch of salivating million dollar budgets. I asked the engineer-presenter about his replication's bandwidth demands, he was not prepared to answer... the C-level guys asked questions like "what color is the box it comes in?" want to sound like a CIO? forget everything you know about object oriented programming, IPv6, and OSPF and Linux,, and mimic a sales-evangelist from EMC.

Re:Easy

[girlintraining]

Just memorise all these and mix them up as you see fit:

I tried that, but apparently they're better at it than I am... my proposal got rejected for not supporting the datamatrix foo buffer 2.0 cloud feature-rich zero-management extranet interface. The work order was to get a replacement power cord... the cleaning people let a vaccum cleaner chew on the last one...

Re:Easy

[Anonymous Coward]

So to paraphrase your comments: They are just enabling the linguistic paradigm with respect to the synergies of their core target market?