The Secure CEO

It Pays for CEOs to Be In the Know About IT

For ten years, I was a non-technically trained executive in a New York-based Internet start-up company and before that I was non-technical human resources professional placed into a work rotation in a management information systems group. I wish I had a book such as Mike Foster’s The Secure CEO, How To Protect Your Computer Systems, Your Company and Your Job when I was in those positions; it might have kept me out of time-consuming and costly mistakes.

I was fresh out of business school when I started the human resources job with a Fortune 500 company. The idea of the rotational program was to give new associates exposure to different aspects of human resources over a period of two to three years. I had no experience using a personal computer until I started business school, and while I was a student I considered them convenient word processors and necessary evils for everything else. I avoided any courses that would force me to spend considerable time in hot and crowded computer labs; anything beyond a PC-based program that I could use on a home computer was of no interest to me.

Then I was thrust into this human resource information systems rotation. I had to become familiar with terms such as servers, token rings, graphical user interfaces (better known as GUIs), case tools, security protocols and more. I administered a database that was coded in a now-obscure language called RAMIS, and I will be the first to admit that I had no idea what I was doing.

Needless to say, the company did not want to let me get my hands on any information system after that rotation was over. But I did come away with a skill that I took into the start-up world. I learned how to work with programmers to solve business problems, and how to explain programming issues to customers and executives. That took me briefly into management consulting then later marketing in the early years of the dot-com era.