Primarily my musings on the practical application of technology and management principles at a financial services company.
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| Modern Middle Manager Primarily my musings on the practical application of technology and management principles at a financial services company. |
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Confessional
Monday, November 24, 2003 Bless me, CEO, for I have sinned. It has been a little over 3 months since my last HTML confession. In that time I have: 1. Busted my budget by 5% because the People in Charge forgot to allocate any money for an imaging outsourcing project they stuffed into my budget. 2. Fought my first of several proxy battles over the future of wireless in the company (I'm for fully-featured laptops with wireless Internet and Citrix to access all the home office apps; my opponent wants Blackberry devices because they're small -- even though they're only Outlook in your pocket). So far I scored one good round. 3. Extorted all of my vendors for a round of golf for myself and my boss. I still haven't broken 100. Damn...I'll never be in senior management at this rate. 4. Played red-light/green-light with a number of banking initiatives until I found out that the (big) capital infusion we were expecting has been delayed. *Significantly* delayed. Delayed as in, "I guess we didn't really want to make a lot of money by doubling our deposits after all." No more footsies with the consultants and vendors we were looking at. And I hadn't even gotten a decent 18 holes from any of them yet... 5. Crafted a 2004 budget incorporating a 15% increase for expected growth and needs based on that huge bank growth potential. Oops. 6. Continued building my power base with other department managers. I've got several on my side, but we installed a new Regional Vice President recently and I haven't met with her yet. I've got to before others start skewing her perspective. 7. Dominated our last two quarterly newsletter with trite essays. I am the master of the mangled metaphor and paralyzed prose, like the Joe Bob Briggs of banking. However, I'm working on my virtues: 1. Using web services to tie our customers and their service providers closer to us while solving one of their business needs. 2. Automating data extraction from our core banking system using a simple XML configuration file parsed by a Python script. This may not sound like much, but it could replace several existing manual processes. Open source may not be the heart of our infrastructure, but it is certainly the circulatory system. 3. The aforementioned wireless project, which will eventually be used by the sales force as we continue our stealth deployment. Hmm. Not many virtues. What's that, CEO? I must atone by undergoing a third-party IT audit starting December 1st? Yes, that should pay for my sins nicely, thankyouverymuch. posted by Henry Jenkins | 11/24/2003 01:44:00 PM
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