IT manager candidates seem a lot like presidents

[ Bill Snyder is on vacation. David Strom is substituting until Bill’s return. ]

With the U.S. elections upon us, it occurred to me that here is a weird similarity between our presidential candidates and the folks who are typically in the running for the CTO or CIO slot. In IT as on the national stage, it’s a colorful collection of characters.

Regardless of where you stand politically, I think the people running for office are a very representative sampling of the kinds of bosses that you have had and will work for in your professional career. And while I can’t summon Tina Fey for a cameo, I can at least describe in words what I mean.

[ Find out where the U.S. presidential candidates stand on matters of technology. ]

The equivalent of Barack Obama would be the young hipster who came from MIT and started jockeying for the CIO slot even though he was still new to the operation. He is whip smart and learns quickly, and he gives great PowerPoint presentations to senior management when it comes time for budget season. He also carries both a BlackBerry for work and an iPhone for personal calls, and is testing the latest Google Android phone too. He is adept at using social media to rally people to his point of view. Lately, he has gotten more attention by senior management because he has been giving informal brown-bag luncheon presentations that have been very well attended about new directions for technology, championing a change in overall desktop strategy.

John McCain’s equivalent is that grizzled veteran who is the first to claim that he doesn’t even use e-mail and still has his secretary print everything out for him to read when he is on the road flying from one far-flung office to the next. But he is lobbying hard for being the CIO, also picking up the idea that we need a lot of change in the department and saying that he is the real IT maverick. He claims that he won’t repeat the mistakes of the outgoing and very unpopular CIO and has lots of plans to shake things up, with a completely new infrastructure plan that will eliminate wasteful spending on new IOS upgrades that the Cisco sales reps have convinced current management is necessary.

Sarah Palin’s doppelganger has been running a small branch office out in the hinterlands, and she rose up quickly in the ranks from there to head the accounting department. In that role, she bounced back everyone’s expense report because they didn’t fill out the forms correctly and tried to be reimbursed for too many entertainment expenses. Because of these tactics, she is often the subject of many intra-office snarky e-mails about her policies. Nevertheless, she has gotten a lot of attention from the rank-and-file IT staffers about her straight talk on cutting back on the large number of pet projects on their plates.

Finally, we have Joe Biden’s stand-in, who is always well groomed and has the whitest hair and teeth of anyone in the room. He has been in middle management in the IT department for many years but never seems to get the nod for the CIO for one reason or another.

Of course, all the candidates need to first check in with Joe the Network Plumber, the only guy on staff who really understands how the Microsoft Windows 2008 servers have been configured. But Joe recently has gotten into a bit of a tussle with the accounting department himself, with rumors of some irregularities with his withholding taxes. Until that is resolved, all networking upgrades have come to a halt.

Thanks for listening to Dave the writer filling in for Bill the columnist while he is on vacation. And please do remember to vote on Nov. 4!