Communicating With - and Convincing - Your CIO

Today's regulatory, financial and technological environments are changing so rapidly that it is often difficult for data center managers and and Chief Information Officers (CIOs) to communicate. Both have specialized areas of focus, and neither has become completely fluent in both the strategic and technological aspects of the data center. Previously, both the data center managers and CIOs made the assumption that that a common interest in information technology would help bridge the gap.

That may have been the case at one time. Yet today, data center managers have developed deep technical knowledge and hands-on experience, while CIOs tend to have big picture views of IT and deep strategic knowledge.

For example, in the Fortune 200, about 20 percent of CIOs have business - not technical - backgrounds. However, data center managers who have technical backgrounds are asked to deliver products that meet business needs. To do this, they must be conversant with business goals and strategies.

Read more about the how data center managers can become conversant in CIO language and receive approval for their projects in – Communicating With—and Convincing—Your CIO - from the June issue of Data Center Management Magazine, which is the print publication of AFCOM. The article is a free preview (registration required) from the magazine, which is available to AFCOM members.

We will be presenting more articles from the Data Center Management Magazine June edition throughout this month.