CRA Inc

1 Sep 05 @ 12:37 am

The CIO Who Admitted Too Much?

CIO Insight is currently highlighting what it describes as the story of “The CIO Who Admitted Too Much.”

[T]he CIO of Overstock.com recently sent off a note to key business partners taking the heat for a wide range of technologies that weren’t working out.

“I’ll start by saying that the vast majority of system problems we have are problems related to updates,” [CIO Shawn] Schwegman wrote. “These update problems have been manifesting themselves as inventory update failures, missing orders, missing images, incorrect status synchs, etc.”

“At the end of the day, all of these problems boil down to Overstock’s failure (read, my failure) to architect a system that can handle real-time updates properly,” Schwegman wrote.

“I cannot apologize enough for both the number of problems you all have had to deal with and for the length of time you’ve been plagued with these problems. I consider this one of my greatest failures over the last two years and I am terribly sorry.”

The article’s title, which asserts that the CIO admitted too much, misses the mark. Stepping up to take responsibility for what his business partners were ultimately going to blame him anyway is hardly the worst of his sins.

Schwegman did two things wrong. First, when the memo leaked, his lame spin–that “the memo was simplified because he was writing ‘to a bunch of non-technical people,’ and that simplifications may have been misleading.”–exacerbated his problems. Second, after offering his mea culpa, he failed to speak with certainty about the next steps needed to begin solving the problems.

posted in category(s): Emerging Case Studies