// ABOUT · CHRISTOPHER P. CONWAY

I never intended
to become a CIO.

It was never on the bingo card. I was thinking naval aviator, or a Jack Ryan-esque CIA operative. I did not wind up flying F-14s or chasing errant Russian submarines. I wound up being the person in the room who could explain what everyone else actually meant.

The number of IT professionals whose career started because they were the only one who could change a printer cartridge is staggering. Mine started in a meeting. I watched my boss try to explain what he wanted while a Lotus Notes developer's brow furrowed deeper and deeper. Then unbidden it came out of my mouth: he wants a relational database that can track the interactions between certain kinds of objects. The developer nodded. My boss looked at me like I had just done a magic trick. I had not. I had just translated.

That is the whole job, as it turns out. I would like to say my success came from being brilliant with technology. It came from being trilingual. I can speak Technology, Business, and People, and translate the requirements of each constituency into specifications, outcomes, and ideas the others can actually understand. Most technology disasters are translation failures wearing a technology costume.

For twenty years I have done that at scale. I build IT functions from the ground up. I run the migrations, the rebuilds, the integrations, the unglamorous work of taking an organization from point A to point F. I am not the caretaker who keeps the lights on. I am the person you call when the lights need to be rewired while everyone is still in the building.

Along the way I learned that change is a psychological problem long before it is a technical one. You do not win buy-in by being right. You win it by aligning the change with what each person actually wants, often by making them more marketable in the process. When I see heroes and martyrs working eighty-hour weeks to execute a manual task, I do not see dedication. I see a broken process and a misaligned incentive.

Now I do two things. I take fractional CIO and advisory engagements for companies that need the judgment without the full-time line item. And I write Technology in Translation, because the same gift that worked in that first meeting works on a page. There are a lot of smart people out there getting talked over by jargon, and somebody should be on their side.

(and yes, if the "trilingual" thing sounds like a flex, that is because it is the only one i have.)

// THE CHAIRS I HAVE SAT IN

Career history.

// CREDENTIALS

Certifications & education.

That is the résumé. Here is the offer.

If you have a technology knot worth untangling, or you just want to argue about where the AI boom is heading, the door is open.