Want one of the worst jobs in American industry? Try chief information officer, a job with a lofty title and plenty of land mines, almost all of them more related to Machiavelli than technology.

Take my friend Gomez (not his real name):

“I barely escaped the debacle of Y2K. I thought I saw a cute way to upgrade all of my systems through supplemental budgets. Well, the corporadoes came after me with tongs. The only thing that saved me was that everyone knew we had been underspending, but no one wanted to face up to it.

“Now? Now the big push is to drive costs down. Which means I have been to India so often that I have started to understand cricket. The first blush is over, but all those firms are making 40% on our work, and the corporate push is to go in ourselves and set up a ‘center of excellence’ in Hyderabad or Bangalore. Management isn’t content to just do software and applications — they are looking at exporting to India every job that conceivably could be done. At least they speak English; my counterpart in manufacturing has to go to China every six weeks.

“At the same time, the divisional IT guys are playing this cute game; they give great lip service to having common platforms and cooperating, but when push comes to shove — they push and they shove. And since they really work for the divisional manager, they are always going to do what works for him first.

“More importantly, they really control the bucks. I have all of the responsibility, but only one-third of the actual dollars. And who do you think takes it in the ear when the systems are down? Me. Not to mention that each and every one of them thinks — no, make that 'knows' — he could do my job better than me.

“What’s left? When you come down to it, I am just a high-priced purchasing agent. I am supposed to beat up on our ‘strategic vendors’ to get continual price reductions and to drive down the processing cost for each transaction.

“We have too many systems, too many vendors, too many platforms. I tried to offer a bonus if we could simplify — but the answer always was, ‘tell the other division to use ours’ — and no one wanted to be the one who changed.

“When it comes to new technology, the divisions always have an answer — ‘let corporate pay for it’ — but they are the ones who will benefit.