Intelligent CXO Issue 40 | Page 15

TECH TRENDS
It ’ s about having empathy for the nature of business . I was meeting with a trucking company in the United States . They do massive freights and their CISO and the CIO are modernising the entire environment . The thing is , the endpoint – the truckers carrying freight – they have CB radios . So how are you going to go to them and start talking about zero trust security and user awareness ? There ’ s a will to do these things at the corporate level , but it has to translate and so these are the things that become impediments to advancement .
It ’ s a work in progress . Sometimes retiring a certain application is going to cause a lot of angst . And these are the things that cause slowdowns . Having empathy for the CXO is important because we are trying to unstick some of this for them by bringing a community of peers together that are doing it . Having them share these best practices is often probably the best tool , more than us giving them the technology .
Have you seen equality for women in tech improve ?
It has improved but there is still a lot of improvement to go . Because I think playing this role requires someone to be multi-threaded , who actually has the ability to juggle multiple things . There is a skillset with a collaborative management and empathetic management , and I ’ m not saying men are not good at this , but women are naturally good at it and this is why we ’ re starting to see more and more of them in that seat .
I ran a women in IT and security CXO conference in January – we wanted it to be very small group because really the team and I wanted to keep it www . intelligentcxo . com
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