CIO Confessions

Slawyer Joel Alleyne gets a page in the Globe and Mail‘s Technology Quarterly Magazine (TQ), as he talks to writer Grant Buckler about the joys and anxieties involved in being CIO and CKO at Borden Ladner Gervais LLP. (I’m blowed if I can find the piece on the web, though, which is sad — either because of my ineptness or because a technology mag ought to be really really good at offering itself up on the internet. )

Snippets:

“[U]nequivocally IT matters to our lawyers and our client relationships.”

BLG has something like 150 servers and 2000 PC’s.

“One major project [for the year] has to do with an enterprise search system that’s being implemented.”

“The things that matter most to our lawyers are the little things, like BlackBerrys.”

“But probably my favourite gadget is my iPod…”

“Information and knowledge are different things, and there’s a distinction between how you manage knowledge and how you manage information. The way I like to think about it is it’s like you’re building a cake, with different layers. We’ve got infrastructure that we have to lay down, then we make sure that all the pipes are working together and we have an application layer that links the systems. And then, on top of that, I have content and knowledge artifacts and things that we do to manage those.”

“The end users don’t have a high tolerance for systems that crash, things that don’t work effectively on their desktop.”

Comments

  1. The article about Joel is in a side article (perhaps posted after the fact?) here:

    “Keep the lights on, and the e-mails flowing”