The Internet, Web services, corporate intranets, distributed computing, globalization of the economyall these have helped elevate the humble information systems guru to a corporate god: the Chief Information Officer. No longer just a service departmentnow we have a voice in determining the strategic goals of our employers. We are part of the corporate mainstream.

Listen up, CIOtime for truth or dare: Do you have the right stuff? Are you an effective Chief Information Officer, or are you just another suit with an attitude? We present here a simple quiz, designed to determine if you have the right stuff to be a CIO. Most of the questions are technical (duh!), some of them may have more than one right answer, some may be multi-part, and there might even be a trick one in there. See if you stack up. OK, lets play(turn up the dramatic music, please; dim the lights for effect)Who Wants to Be a CIO?

1. What was Gary Kildall doing when IBM officials visited his home with the intention of buying C/PM as the operating system for their yet to be built Personal PC?

Legend has it that he purposely decided to go flying in his private plane, thus snubbing IBM and losing out on the opportunity that then went to Microsoft. (Since this is probably apocryphal, we will also accept anything about his wife or business associates being unwilling to sign a non-disclosure agreement without Gary present.)

2. Who is the father of Java?
Part 2Has he ever been spotted in a shirt with a collar?

James Gosling, who is also the chief geek at Sun Microsystems. Part 2 No.

3. What is the difference between Little Endian and Big Endian?

This is a real geeker. Little Endian means that the low-order byte of a number is stored in memory at the lowest address, and the high-order byte at the highest address. Big Endian means that the high-order byte of the number is stored in memory at the lowest address, and the low-order byte at the highest address. Very important when writing machine code.

4. Who would you rather have for a neighbor, Bill Gates or Larry Ellison?

Bill Gates is probably a better neighbor. Larry Ellison reportedly made a lot of people in San Jose unhappy by using his private jet after hours.

5. What is SEMCI? Part 2Is it dead?

SEMCI stands for Single Entry Multiple Company Interface. It makes no sense for data ever to be entered more than one time. Part 2Yes, although SEMCI has been replaced by Straight Through Processing systems.

6. Do you spend more money on geek tools (PDA, two-way pagers, handhelds, portable devices, GPS, etc.) than yourcompany spends on those toysum tools for your use?

This is an automatic qualifier. If you are on your third pocket PC device and your corporate budget only allows a Palm Pilot with a calendar and address book, you are probably a geek scholar. (Bonus points if you ever owned a Timex Data Link watch.)

7. What is the MITS Altair 8800?

The first commercially available personal computer, based on the Intel 8080 processor. It was featured in a 1975 issue of Popular Electronics and was sold as a kit for about $400. It had no operating system. (I wanted one so badly I almost sold my car to get the money. Bill Gates got onedoes that tell you something?)

8. Who invented the mouse?

Xerox (along with a graphical interface and a WYSIWYG display). Sorry Apple, nice try.

9. What is XMLife?

Looks like another insurance question. XMLife is essentially an XML DTD developed by ACORD to standardize data transactions for the life and health side of the industry. XMLife evolved from a very cool COM object model that was developed by ACORD (with a little help from Microsoft) to standardize data transaction for client server models.

10. What is JCL?Part 2Why is IBM JCL so weird?

JCL is Job Control Languageit tells the hardware and the operating system of a mainframe what to do with the data you are sending. JCL essentially controls the I/O for a particular job or program. Back in the days of punch cards we would also save our JCL cards because the chances that we could get them right again were infinitesimal. Part 2Legend has it that IBM programmers working on the same projects were scattered all across the world. Each programmer would develop his own particular naming conventions. Thus there was no consistency in the ways things were done. The real reason is probably just because.

OKan even 10 questions. How did you do? World-class geek or pretender? Let your conscience be your guide. Maybe you better order that C# from Amazon. Maybe you should write your own. Anyway, these were pretty simple because we didnt want to scare you. Next time they just might be a little tougher. See ya then.

Special Reports /

Who Wants to Be a CIO?

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