As I'm in both communities, it's not that hard for me. I would like to keep some of the contacts I made here, as some of the discussions were quite interesting and nice. The offer to join the surgery crowd for free is fair. Hope to see - preferably all of you - on the other side.

Uhhh, nice. All that I EVER wanted …. … wait a second … Ok, here goes: - Get to know the company and all the relevant people. Make friends or at least establish a proper working relationship. - Understand them and their pain points. - Help them to resolve their problems - Get to know your area of which you have control of. And those where you DON‘T! - Meanwhile establish some sort of governance from where u can draw policies which eventually will help to finally getting a grip on all of the issues the business is facing. - ALSO establish (very) good connections to IT! They‘re the ones who will most likely „suffer“ through all the policies you’re going to impose on them. Therefore it helps A LOT having them on your side as well. - See to it, that „business“ won’t suffer any incidents while you’re working through all of the above. … good luck! As for the tooth fairy: Ever watched hellboy 2? …

@Duncan Proffitt Yeah well, to be fair "you said green field". Aka dreamland. So, as a primarily positive person (don't ask how long THAT took me!!), I assume that greenfield equals NOT to burnt soil. Right? Therefore IF anything will happen, the ONLY way is through and with the people. Always! It's never been different in the whole history of men. (Learning that took me even LOOOONGER!) And to get people in the right direction takes "making friends". Even though I'd rather refer to acquaintances, as I've never been at any place long enough to really do friendship. As for my current role, I made damn sure that the CFO (until the founder's gone our hidden CEO) was on my side and got what I entended to do, BEFORE I signed the contract. Because, after all, if you need to implement change - and that's btw. our primary role, (!) we're change agents with a fancy title - you need the big bosses backup. If that's not a given, I leave. And I walked a few times already. I know that the job market in the UK might be different from Germanys, but I wouldn't have accepted a role within the place you seem to be stuck in. As for drugs: ... well, doobies don't work, that was quite a disillusioning experience when I was the only one being still sober ... as for alcohol, that gets me depressed if it's too much. In the beginning I had sucidal thoughts, later - and wiser - I had imaginations of a killing spree. ... both not very useful outcomes and definitely not helping to eleviate the situation. So ... ! These days I get my kicks out of stuff done properly I guess.

I get you in a way. Just the other way round. Funnily enough in my current position I'm flooded with people who "want to help me". Cold calls, e-mails, LI-Flooding you name it. Well, yeah, I get it, I'm the one dealing out the money. Nontheless, I certainly would appreciate if people actually read in which department I work. I'm not in IT per se, nor do I ITIL (even though that's obviously a qualification I have to pursue now in my position, sigh) or IT-Service optimizazion. No HR or processes either. Sigh. Even those who get it, I cannot work with everyone, nor want I. And I certainly don't have time to sort through hundreds of business proposals just to find the right one. I normally know whom I want to work with, what solutions I need and in which order I get the things rolling. After all, we're in 3 and we need to get 5000 people somehow involved in basic (IT-)security, next to handling all the IT-Shit. ... next to a CISO whom I explain the difference between his and my job. So time IS a factor. So, don't worry Doc, when I call I certainly won't waste your time like that dude. :)

@Duncan Proffitt

@Kaz Baker Probably it even was like that they wanted to actually do sth. helpful. I mean, when you look at where IT really comes from, nothing was taught at universities for quite some time. Even nowadays it’s mostly TOJ for many things. Especially testing and IT-Security. So, everything that has to do with somehow making IT useful and less error prone has basically zero appearance in university studies. It figures, that some felt that there should be at least some common denominator. Alas, as it’s Wild West capitalism, they soon found that there was (a lot of) money to be made. They got greedy. It went downhill from there. … my theory.

@Duncan Proffitt Why would you have sleepless nights? It’s only work.

@Duncan Proffitt I LOVE long stories. ;) Yeah, seems legit. After burn out and slow recovery I decided that my health is much more important than my duty. Especially the worrying about decisions I wasn’t able to influence anyways.