Discussion on:

How the tech chiefs' secret charm offensive wants to make the business love IT

Getting "face time" with the bigwigs for a department that doesn't seem to directly make them money is a fantastic idea. I think that in itself is a necessity and bravo to the brave CIO souls who plead our case as a whole.

The problems with fast-tracking VIPs is many of them don't know how to use such a service to its best, at the expense of overriding more urgent issues for people on the lower end of the food chain. I have taken numerous requests for assistance and have been told by assistants that their device is with them while they are in London and they're "having a problem", can I fix it? (not without more information), or they will have their assistant call in and try to have their item fixed when they are in a meeting with the device, can we just remote in? (if you're using it in a meeting, interrupting you will get us the WRONG kind of face time), or the device is turned off on your desk and the fix has to come from within your own profile (logging in as an admin won't fix it). Meanwhile, the line supervisor can clearly articulate their issue that affects 12 people, they are available for the fix now, and it has a higher triage need than the VIP wondering what to do with his Junk Mail folder getting too full.

Another point mentioned to me was if the Help Desk itself is known to be problematic to the rest of the organization due to slow service, incompetent support, or other deficiency, having a superior track that insulates the VIPs from the companywide quality of service may help the CIO look good to the upper management but the workers below them will have to suffer in silence with the problems - even if the VIP is sympathetic to the needs of rest of the organization. Funding for better service or desperately needed staff will never be justified when all they see is the good...and eventually the upwardly-mobile grumblings will tarnish the reputation for the whole IT department as well as its CIO. That is the kind of visibility we don't want.

The way I and my colleagues view it is ALL people should receive VIP service, and we will triage the issues to the best of our ability, with what we are given. We are smart enough to discern what is mission critical, and when we are free to do so, we make ourselves as a department, as well as our CIO, receive praise.

was a division director in a state government agency. I got called to an outage in his office–not a page, a phone call, with a 911 response–which was standard for any call from a division director's office. I took the time to finish the call I was working on, then tell the next two users in line I needed to go upstairs.

I got his problem fixed (bad nic card), then went back to my other customers. A couple of days later he grabbed me in the hall and wanted to know why I had left other customers waiting while I serviced his PC; I told him the response policy as given to me. He told me that as long as I was supporting his division, he wanted his people's PCs fixed first because they were the ones who did the actual work. I was to respond to his office in whatever sequence the call fell in the queue.

Other than calling his office and letting him know I had the call, that's pretty much what I did the rest of the time I worked there...although, whenever possible, he did get same day service. As far as I was concerned, he'd earned it.

I think the articles end comment about CEOs needing to have trust in the CIO's plans is key. Non-technical CEOs may not be able to fully comprehend the technical considerations of the CIO 's strategy and so need to rely on trust / faith to a larger degree than they do with other divisions.