IT managers have to deal with all sorts of issues, from hardware provisioning to remote security, but sometimes the biggest challenge is working with your own senior leadership.
The idea of the “C-suite” is that its inhabitants aren’t just good at your business – they’re good at business in the general sense, with wisdom to enrich any company they choose to work with. This explains why relatively small, fairly similar groups of people across many diverse business types and sizes get to command far more decision-making power and budget authority than their experience or job history might seem to justify.
They’re not all the same, though. The CEO, or chief executive officer, is the real boss. He or she may also be called the MD in the UK, or the company president in the US. All the other C-something-O roles are fundamentally helpers to the CEO, because the jobs the boss is expected to do are so numerous and diverse that encompassing them all in one great messianic figurehead is impractical.
As a reader, the ones you’re most likely to be dealing with are the chief technology officer and the chief
