Sad Meeting!

We had a first of its kind IT staff meeting. In three separate sessions the State CIO addressed approximately 1,500 IT staff in total. We are talking about a staff meeting to relay the strategic plan, etc.. Some of the agency CIOs also participated in the presentation. I hope it is the last of its kind as well. I do enjoy my job for the most part and take pride in my work, but if I were independently wealthy, I would have simply walked out after the meeting and never looked back. It was truly that disheartening. I am just glad the business process owners did not attend.

You are holding meetings that have never been held before, wouldn't you practice and polish your presentation. It appears they did not find that to be important. They must realize that when they are giving presentations to the IT Staff that they are not going to instill confidence in their message when they cannot figure out how to work the mouse, cannot find the back button on the browser, cannot find the location on the CIO's site where they have documents they want to share with you, cannot figure out how to scroll, cannot figure out how to get out of design mode to display the Powerpoint presentation, and some lacking presentation skills. At one point one presenter had the audience read slides, slowly advancing through three to four slides accompanied by three to four minutes of complete silence. Ugh!

I have said it before, my shop uses Domio for some applications, but Exchange is our e-mail platform. Needless to say, I don't have any say in that. If all you are doing is e-mail Exchange will do, but if you utilize the programming environments in Domino then it only makes sense to utilize it for e-mail. The CIO announced that all agencies will be moving to the new standard for e-mail: Microsoft Exchange. The transition is to have Groupwise users moved over in 1-2 years with Domino shops moved over in years 3,4, and 5. There are multiple agencies utilizing Domino for internal applications, Internet applications, as well as e-mail. I am not sure how it was decided that it is better for those utilizing the environment that does more than just e-mail to move to the e-mail only platform than to move those only doing e-mail to a platform that can do more.

The CIO basically said the decision has been made and you may as well get on board because it is going to happen, no use fighting it.

I have shared my opinions on this subject, but being so far down the ladder I am not sure my thoughts are given much credence.