Roughly around this time last year Alcatel-Lucent (News 
- Alert) released one of the most creative marketing vehicles for bringing attention to the challenges facing large enterprise CIOs. Titled “The New Guy”, a series of videos chronicled the triumphs and set-backs of Alex Warner, a skilled CIO whose start-up was bought by the 60,000 person global enterprise Kromacom. Kromacom then handed Alex the overwhelming job to “fix” IT.
Alex is tasked with aligning IT with business objectives to enable Kromacom to be more agile, responsive, and faster to market. And, as he quickly finds out while not a mission impossible, there is a lot to fix.
The appeal of Season 1 was its mix of insights on all aspects IT professionals face in their journey to transform IT to meet the objectives of upper management with some humor. For fans of the series like me, the great news is that Alex is back for Season 2.
Click here to play video.
After discovering all of the problems associated with legacy systems, dysfunctional business processes and a skeptical work force, Alex and his team can now focus on solving problems. In fact, this season is about the trials and tribulations of getting from a troubled present to a more cost effective, secure and responsive future.
The trailer should give viewers a taste of the tone of the campaign. The home page for “The New Guy” provides the episode names for the coming attractions, and a link to follow him (@NewGuyStory) as the journey continues.
Coming attractions include the following:
- EPISODE 1: Connecting the Dots
- EPISODE 2: Always Sunny in IT
- EPISODE 3: TERA–train
- EPISODE 4: Failure to Launch
- EPISODE 5: Big Surprise
Here is a bit of a spoiler that hopefully gets readers to bookmark the New Guy and follow Alex on Twitter (News - Alert). Episode 1, “Connecting the Dots”, which will be up very soon, asks Alex to bring on a new location following an acquisition. It’s a common but heinous problem for IT workers, especially because Alex’s new location may not have existing next generation infrastructure. The goal is to turn something that used to take weeks or months into something that takes only days or hours.
I recommend you tune in to how Alex and his team address large enterprise IT departments, and how they deal with the physical and virtual troubles that come with real-time updates.
Edited by
Kyle Piscioniere
