The hassles of corporate politics, including meetings and death by PowerPoint, are some of the reasons programmers would not want to become chief information officers. Do you aspire to suck up to the CFO?
When David Zink became Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Rhode Island's CIO in July 2002, he found an IT department that couldn't get out of its own way. Like a football team that can drive to the five-yard line but can't score, the IT department could never quite finish its implementations.