David Parizek officially became the CIO of InfoStream on his 13th anniversary of working with InfoStream. In addition to his top level engineering work, he will be playing a more active role in overseeing and implementing new technology for InfoStream.
So what is a CIO? It stands for Chief Information Officer. In most businesses, that is the top person in charge of all technology in the firm. Strategic planning, implementation, oversight, improvements/upgrades and basically keeping the firm ahead of the competition.
In our case it's all that and even more. We have a difficult balance of keeping you, our clients, ahead of the competition and yet we can't have you so far ahead that you have issues or added expenses. So one of our key philosophies is to "eat our own dog food". Which simply means we implement and use the same things we recommend to our clients. Not just in a testing environment but in actual production before we even tell clients about it. Sometimes this means lots of pains for us on a tech that isn't "fully baked" but better we find out first than you.
For example, when our entire industry was terrified about Office 365 hosted email, we saw the writing on the wall. Sure, we LOVED in house email as it was (is) an amazing and powerful system that we are top experts on. But Office 365 offered massive mailboxes at a ridiculously cheap price, then included spam protection, and antivirus, and backup, and 24 hour monitoring and disaster recovery... and on and on. We weren't happy about the change but it was clear we couldn't let our prejudices hold us back and we started using it as it sounded too good to be true. It wasn't. So we began rolling it out to all of our clients. Turns out a few years later, a bunch of our competitors finally realized it also but now they were way behind.
So as the CIO, one of David's key roles is to implement systems like this for InfoStream. Plan out how to convert over, how to implement, cut us over and deal with any issues. Then evaluate everything, make adjustments or bail out. We do a lot of that.
For example, we have been working on another major projects for our clients. Moving everything to Amazon servers. Huge advantages but huge change too! We see all the amazing perks but what are the downsides? Risk? Gotcha's? It's a lot of totally new technology, terms, systems, everything. Sometimes this stuff is like learning to fly a helicopter and the controls happen to be written in ancient Sumerian. But if it works... wow... it can be a huge boost for our clients.
As CIO, David can give our clients a huge boost and InfoStream even better abilities to serve you. It's exciting and we are beyond proud to have him on the team!