I was a Cloud Architect who had been working nearly 10 years at a financial institution. When our CIO left, the board had made a poor decision with their replacement. The new CIO was a complete bumblehead not knowing which direction was up.
Eventually an initative came down the chain that we were going to put our on prem datacenter in the cloud. As I had been in the role for so long, I already had multiple strategies on how to accomplish this and save the company over a quarter of a million a year in the process while providing additional DR to mission critical components that they didnt otherwise have.
I presented the strategy to the CIO, who wanted to get a second opinion. Ok- fair. The second opinion was that we had a solid cloud migration plan. CIO wanted a third opinion, then a fourth. All of which said we had accounted for unknown variables and were set to proceed. On his FIFTH opinion, I remember sitting in yet another office going through introductions. This random guy talks about being a cloud Architect for a bank, moving critical apps to the cloud and providing DR.
Bumblehead CIO turns to us and mouths "WOW!". As if that was the most incredable and impressive thing that he has heard in his career. It was at that minute that I realized that not only did he now know what he was doing as CIO, but he couldnt even recognize the milestones that my current team was achieving in regard to cost savings, security, migrations to serverless cloud features, and the solid migration plan I had presented many times to him prior.
What I learned in that moment was a well crafted 15 second introduction is more important than what most people think.
Eventually an initative came down the chain that we were going to put our on prem datacenter in the cloud. As I had been in the role for so long, I already had multiple strategies on how to accomplish this and save the company over a quarter of a million a year in the process while providing additional DR to mission critical components that they didnt otherwise have.
I presented the strategy to the CIO, who wanted to get a second opinion. Ok- fair. The second opinion was that we had a solid cloud migration plan. CIO wanted a third opinion, then a fourth. All of which said we had accounted for unknown variables and were set to proceed. On his FIFTH opinion, I remember sitting in yet another office going through introductions. This random guy talks about being a cloud Architect for a bank, moving critical apps to the cloud and providing DR.
Bumblehead CIO turns to us and mouths "WOW!". As if that was the most incredable and impressive thing that he has heard in his career. It was at that minute that I realized that not only did he now know what he was doing as CIO, but he couldnt even recognize the milestones that my current team was achieving in regard to cost savings, security, migrations to serverless cloud features, and the solid migration plan I had presented many times to him prior.
What I learned in that moment was a well crafted 15 second introduction is more important than what most people think.