You can't always avoid an ambush - but you can generally learn from it

If life was a movie you would know when you were about to be ambushed: the soundtrack would slow to a heartbeat; there would be a sudden glint high up on the ridge; a twig would break to your left, and your horse would rear up.

Unless you ride your horse to the office each day it might be harder for CIOs to spot an imminent ambush.

Sometimes though you just know one is looming. Take the CIO gearing up for CeBIT. "I know I'm going to get ambushed by every two-bit ERP vendor, but I'm going to be polite and firm. There is technology that I want to see and I'm just going to go and see it."

A CIO entering a computer trade show is the equivalent of John Wayne painting a target on his back to give the Sioux a sporting chance. You just know what is going to happen.

In the normal course of events ambushes are not so easily anticipated. CIO magazine spoke recently with a wide range of CIOs from many different sectors, each of whom had experienced different forms of ambush. Many CIOs admitted to having been ambushed by vendors in one way or another, and then described the long haul to rebuild trust. CIOs also described occasions when they were ambushed by the boss, the business, a journalist - even the technology itself. Only two of the dozen CIOs interviewed said that they had never been ambushed at all. Below is a selection of their experiences.

To encourage the CIOs to be frank about their experiences so that others could learn from them, their identities have been concealed. But they represent a broad cross-section of Australia's CIO population - some female, some male, some relatively young, others more seasoned.

They have heard that twig break.

Teflon Terror

"It was one of the senior IT managers who wasn't very well liked (he was probably hated really). He was a very political sort of bloke who was clever at wriggling his way out of problems and had a nasty streak. Eventually he saw an opportunity in the business area and moved across.

Once he was there he knew where IT's strengths and weaknesses were, and he just homed in on all our weaknesses. One of the areas where we had a problem was in transparency of information. He knew that and was always asking for reports, then demanding to know where the figures came from, how they had been derived and how accurate they were. He just kept on coming at us.

We were between a rock and a hard place. My boss told me that he was the client and I had to give him what he wanted. But he and I knew that I couldn't because it would have cost us thousands of hours to generate the reports he wanted.

It became quite nasty.

Eventually I wrote some software to help me. It took around three people 12 months at a time when management was already screaming for resources - they wanted it both ways.

From then on, though, we had the system that we should have had all along. The beaut part was that once I produced it they all loved it.

As for the ambusher - well he was still there and more hated than ever before."