Acronyms, our industry is awash with them, one of which being of course your humble job title. Officially we recognise it as being Chief Information Officer. Analysts suggest it should be changed to Chief Integration Officer, but, because today's Friday, we've scoured the world for alternative meanings that you may not want to add to your LinkedIn profile.
1 Career Is Over: It is obvious, but still a favourite and a gag that has a high mileage, but has become a classic and many CIOs have shared career is over jokes with us.
2 Cost Is Outrageous: One that harks back to the pre-alignment debate days when everyone else on the board thought IT and its head the CIO were nothing but a bottomless money pit.
3 Calls In Outsourcers: Chimes nicely with today's needs to cut costs and let's be honest if it's application development you need, then outsourced providers often have the best staff at the right cost.
4 Crikey Its Operational: No not the death cry of a terrible Aussie nature film maker but the response from staff when they discover that your SAP roll out was finished on time, on budget and all the data is still there.
5 Cloud Is Over-rated: One for the CIO who likes to keep that data close to home and not hanging about in some grid of unknown machines where a host of users beyond your organisation can attack it.
6 Can I Offshore?: The first thing a CIO asks on their first day in a new job when they see the budget available to them to modernise a major organisation (probably heard loudest in the public sector, where the answer will be: "Yes, but don't let the Daily Mail find out".)
7 Coffee Is Overdue: What your PA thinks your job title means as in the pressured environment of today's economy it seems to be the only thing you have time to say to them. (Hint, now is the time to ask how they are before you forget and the CEO calls with a BlackBerry problem).
8 Call It Off: The hardest thing to say about a project that is dear to your technical heart and has gobbled up hours of programmer's time and budget, but occasionally it really must be uttered.
9 Change Is Ongoing: Not just a job title but a mantra, especially when staff and board members ask why the ERP system is being upgraded in what feels like weeks after you upgraded the document management system.
10 Clarity Is Occasional: This may be how you feel about the responses you get from vendors or your development team, but it is also what the board feel about you too.
11 Call It Opensource: A response for CIOs to use when a project fails to meet its objectives, throw it back to the workforce to suggest improvements, hell why not let them have the code and see if they can make enterprise search actually work.
12 Can't Install Optimisations: Coming to a dialog box near you, the grey CIO box that alerts users to the fact that you didn't upgrade their hardware or software with the budget from the last quarter, so all those optimisations your team installed are not actually available to improve productivity for at least another quarter. Oh, what's that, you've gone over to half yearly reports and budgets too!
13 Call Indian Office: In the modern organisation no CIO has the budget for people in the UK office that can actually customise an application, and anyway even with record unemployment, no one in Britain studied something useful like IT, they all did Media Studies degrees and work in PR. No if you need something urgently done to your systems, the CIO will demand you call the Indian Office where there is a mass of clever people who can build applications as quickly Jenson Button drives.
14 Chaos Is Omnipresent: Chaos is the new order, blame it on the internet. Your job as CIO is to keep chaos levels steady so it doesn't disturb the CEOs game of golf. Your job is to stop bloggers and Twitter mad customers revealing how bad your customer service is because the CRM system doesn't work, you've got to prevent hackers penetrating the firewall, back office staff need to comply with a host of new regulations and if you don't have a spot on e-commerce system you don't have any customers.
15 Car Is Ordered: You've made it. You have chief in your job title and a seat on the board, now you need the car to demonstrate your importance and the fleet manager has just the thing for you on order. In your mind it's the new Jaguar, or perhaps it's a Lotus Elise, maybe something exotic, Maserati even do a four door saloon these days. Trouble is, the PR department has got to the fleet manager and expounded the need for the company to have high green credentials, so your car on order is a Gee Whiz!
1 Career Is Over: It is obvious, but still a favourite and a gag that has a high mileage, but has become a classic and many CIOs have shared career is over jokes with us.
2 Cost Is Outrageous: One that harks back to the pre-alignment debate days when everyone else on the board thought IT and its head the CIO were nothing but a bottomless money pit.
3 Calls In Outsourcers: Chimes nicely with today's needs to cut costs and let's be honest if it's application development you need, then outsourced providers often have the best staff at the right cost.
4 Crikey Its Operational: No not the death cry of a terrible Aussie nature film maker but the response from staff when they discover that your SAP roll out was finished on time, on budget and all the data is still there.
5 Cloud Is Over-rated: One for the CIO who likes to keep that data close to home and not hanging about in some grid of unknown machines where a host of users beyond your organisation can attack it.
6 Can I Offshore?: The first thing a CIO asks on their first day in a new job when they see the budget available to them to modernise a major organisation (probably heard loudest in the public sector, where the answer will be: "Yes, but don't let the Daily Mail find out".)
7 Coffee Is Overdue: What your PA thinks your job title means as in the pressured environment of today's economy it seems to be the only thing you have time to say to them. (Hint, now is the time to ask how they are before you forget and the CEO calls with a BlackBerry problem).
8 Call It Off: The hardest thing to say about a project that is dear to your technical heart and has gobbled up hours of programmer's time and budget, but occasionally it really must be uttered.
9 Change Is Ongoing: Not just a job title but a mantra, especially when staff and board members ask why the ERP system is being upgraded in what feels like weeks after you upgraded the document management system.
10 Clarity Is Occasional: This may be how you feel about the responses you get from vendors or your development team, but it is also what the board feel about you too.
11 Call It Opensource: A response for CIOs to use when a project fails to meet its objectives, throw it back to the workforce to suggest improvements, hell why not let them have the code and see if they can make enterprise search actually work.
12 Can't Install Optimisations: Coming to a dialog box near you, the grey CIO box that alerts users to the fact that you didn't upgrade their hardware or software with the budget from the last quarter, so all those optimisations your team installed are not actually available to improve productivity for at least another quarter. Oh, what's that, you've gone over to half yearly reports and budgets too!
13 Call Indian Office: In the modern organisation no CIO has the budget for people in the UK office that can actually customise an application, and anyway even with record unemployment, no one in Britain studied something useful like IT, they all did Media Studies degrees and work in PR. No if you need something urgently done to your systems, the CIO will demand you call the Indian Office where there is a mass of clever people who can build applications as quickly Jenson Button drives.
14 Chaos Is Omnipresent: Chaos is the new order, blame it on the internet. Your job as CIO is to keep chaos levels steady so it doesn't disturb the CEOs game of golf. Your job is to stop bloggers and Twitter mad customers revealing how bad your customer service is because the CRM system doesn't work, you've got to prevent hackers penetrating the firewall, back office staff need to comply with a host of new regulations and if you don't have a spot on e-commerce system you don't have any customers.
15 Car Is Ordered: You've made it. You have chief in your job title and a seat on the board, now you need the car to demonstrate your importance and the fleet manager has just the thing for you on order. In your mind it's the new Jaguar, or perhaps it's a Lotus Elise, maybe something exotic, Maserati even do a four door saloon these days. Trouble is, the PR department has got to the fleet manager and expounded the need for the company to have high green credentials, so your car on order is a Gee Whiz!
Mia O | Published: 07:42 GMT, 24 November 2009
At least being CIO, you have a job unlike other people who dont and they have to rely to some payday loan lenders. Payday loans lenders operate without the huge business structure of banks, they don't perform credit checks, and many of them will use whatever income you can claim – even people on unemployment can get a payday loans.