This photo was taken by the CIO and sent to my direct boss, when he was attending a meeting. He was unhappy that this rack-mounted switch which was set up for a meeting was simply left on the desk. To him it was an unsightly mess.

Why was this switch set up in the room and left on the table in the first place was because there weren’t sufficient ports in the room to support the number of laptops required. From the looks of the photo, I suspect that even if we had set up the switch on the floor, there is no avoiding the tangle of wires. Whether the complaint came from the CIO personally or he was upset because someone commented on our ‘shoddy work’ is irrelevant. What would be relevant would be a long term solution to the insufficient IT infrastructure in that particular meeting room. However, I do not pretend to know management and tell my CIO what actually requires to be done.

Our CIO does give us the feeling that he looks down on us, the very ‘grunts’ who would face the enemy (i.e. the users) on the front line. I have seen on one occasion he gave one of my seniors a dressing down over the matter of housekeeping in our department room. I do not know whether he had actually came all the way down from our data centre down at the armpit of Singapore (somewhere near Paya Lebar Airbase) to do that, or my senior was just unfortunate to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.

I could only say I am fortunate not to be the one on the receiving end of his tongue lashing, but for sure I do find it ridiculous that ‘the CO [Commanding Officer] is doing the work of the CSM [Company Sergeant Major’. During our days in National Service, a good CO almost never give direct orders to us pertaining to matters of camp maintenance or area cleaning. That falls under the supervision of the CSM, who will order us to do all sorts of menial labor such as plucking weeds from the glass patch in front of the company line office, clearing mud from the drain ‘intersector’ (a term invented by a CSM), washing the vehicle bay and wiping dust from fan blades and florescent light covers in our bunks. In short, the CO only concerns himself with matters of the macro-management of the unit and such matters of micro-management is normally left to the CSM or the individual Platoon Sergeants. There’s always a good reason for a chain of command.

Anyway, other than the above, at times the CIO would override decisions our direct boss made, or even IT security protocols to satisfy ‘people in power’ who contact him directly over a certain matter. In one particular incident, after we and our boss have rejected a particular request to set up a laptop that is not built to the company’s standard, the CIO spoke to the same senior above and asked him to get it done. He claimed it to be a one off incident. (The reason for such a request is because the user’s secretary would not want to mix work with home and has an irrational fear that her personal stuff such as photos or videos may end up on the company’s network. How that would be possible when access to the company via VPN is through Citrix is beyond me! We suspected that the real reason for this request was that the security protocols on company compliant laptops would have prevented it from connecting to any network outside the company to access the Internet, since it is locked down to allow only IP addresses on the local subnet it is connected to, and then to the website that connects the VPN.)

Unfortunately, we end up manually installing another laptop for another user within a month. Even so, on the second occasion it was at least justified since the user was doing the company’s work – being a sales trader who would be introducing our company’s trading platform to potential customers. In the context of the army, what the CIO has done is the equivalent of the CO disregarding the TSR [Training Safety Regulations] and directly meddling in the execution of low level combat tactics. As we all know how often that leads to disastrous consequences.

Thus, in a certain way, when the CIO actually sent the photo to our direct boss and not to us directly, it is actually an improvement, though not by much. Perhaps he has been reading some ‘For Dummies’ book recently. Frankly, I personally do hope that there are other matters that would direct his attention to concentrate more on the macro-management aspect of the department.

Leave it to the ‘grunts’ like us and the field commanders to do the real fighting. I’ll definitely prefer he sits in the comfort of his command center and not bother about us. Alternatively, I hope the auditors have had enough of his disregard for IT security protocols and smack him on the arse for his endless meddling in daily operations.

I almost forgot… one of the field commanders is the ‘bway kan’ guy that I mentioned in an earlier rant. How tragic!