My Elevator Pitch

When I was in sales and marketing, oh so many years ago, we spent hours and days, months even, perfecting the perfect 30-second "elevator" pitch. You know, the one that you use when someone asks you "so what do you do?" and you have a 30-second elevator ride to tell them? It usually goes something like..."I'm a [job title] for [company], the global leader in [some industry jargon]".

In education it may be called something different, but we still have elevator pitches, generally speaking -- some key points and messaging that's important to get across when talking to a prospective student, faculty member, or donor.

What's important about the elevator pitch is the description of who you work for, not really what you do for them. Usually. This past weekend, however, I realized that an elevator pitch might be in order for what I actually do, too.

You see, I went to a family event and saw distant relatives -- the kind you only run into once every 5 to 10 years or so. The conversation that ensued went something like this:

Them: "It's great to see you, how have you been? And what are you doing these days?"

Me: "I'm the CIO at Menlo College; been there about  a year and a half."

Them: "Menlo is a great school, congratulations! So....what's a CIO?"

Me: "Chief information officer."

Them: [looking a little glassy-eyed] "Information officer? So you handle information requests for the college? Or PR? Or...?"

Me: "Um, no...actually I manage the college's technology. Like servers, and network, and computers...things like that."

Them: [even more glass-eyed, but feeling compelled to ask the obligatory follow-up question] "Wow, sounds exciting! So what are you working on these days?" And here's where I need that elevator pitch. The truth is we're working on bringing up a learning management system, moving some of our servers to the cloud, and rolling out virtual desktops (VDI). Really exciting stuff! But nearly *everyone* I know gets more than a little glassy-eyed when we start talking cloud computing or VDI. It's conceptual stuff, with no clear definitions -- even within the profession.

So explaining it to a non-techie...fugetaboutit. Except, of course, I can't. I won't. I think this stuff is waaaay too cool to *not* explain. :-)