Editor's Letter

Finding Common Ground

With everything that CIOs have to worry about these days, I hate to even bring up the lawyers. But there they are, waiting patiently by the dotted line next to so many IT responsibilities. Start with Sarbanes-Oxley compliance and scores of new legislative measures and just look down the list of legal concerns. You'll find everything from open source legality and customer data privacy to vendor license management and contract negotiation.

Yet for all the domain-specific knowledge that separates CIOs from attorneys, there is a big patch of common ground. "We both want to mitigate risk," says Jon Payne, vice president of IT at Wild Oats Markets Inc. (and pictured on our cover with his favorite legal colleague). "They just approach the problem from a different discipline than we do."

Payne is one of a growing number of IT execs who purposefully cultivate stronger relationships with company counsel -- an important trend we cover this month in our cover story ("Who's Got Your Back?") and in Thornton May's CIO Habitat research report. Among the Habitat research findings is that 73% of the midmarket CIOs surveyed are spending "significantly more time" dealing with legal concerns today than five years ago. But rather than following Shakespeare's famous quip about what to do with all the lawyers, May recommends that "what midmarket CIOs need to do is 'skill' the lawyers -- that is, ensure that everyone who works with IT on legal issues understands the implications of decisions."

"Give them context," agrees CIO Rob Baxter of Phoenix-based Shamrock Foods Co. "Lawyers enjoy it. Tell them what they're helping you on and why you're trying to work through this stuff." The best time for a CIO to get close to the legal team, in fact, is long before the need arises. When Payne joined $1.1-billion Wild Oats in Boulder two years ago, for example, he went out of his way to meet his eight-person legal department. "Just start a dialogue," he advises.

But with some people, a dialogue can be the last thing a CIO wants -- especially when it's an unwelcome call from an unknown vendor. Senior editor Megan Santosus wondered how busy people cope with the flood of vendor cold calls. So she dug up some entertaining dodges and practical tips for culling the calls you might actually want to take ("Besieged by Vendors"). I was surprised to read that vendor cold-calling still has a conversion rate into new business of about 10% (I thought it would be much lower). That means the practice will probably endure, so it's worth arming yourself against even more invasions of your time. One especially creative CIO, for example, perfected a simple way to fool bar-code scanners that track attendee badge information at conferences.

Also in this issue, we take a deeper look at how and why midmarket companies are moving to next-generation networking with MPLS, or Multiprotocol Label Switching ("The Next-Gen Network"). Migrating from frame relay networks (which cannot prioritize traffic) to MPLS paves the way to converged networks of voice and data that support far more sophisticated applications and services. But MPLS is still a young technology with hidden costs, higher staffing needs, management challenges and reliability worries -- all problems more keenly felt at midsized companies than larger enterprises. Moving to MPLS has to be treated as "a long-term bet," one analyst in our story says. "Take a good look at it before you commit."

Probably just what your lawyer would say, too.

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