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De Brino was managing IT for a software company when an email virus struck. He and his staff worked through the night checking and fixing computers. Then De Brino walked into an office and spotted a server under a desk. "What's this box?" he thought. By the end of the night, his crew had discovered a few more. None had asset tags.
The mystery computers were in the engineering department, so De Brino confronted the manager of engineering, who confessed. De Brino told him that the servers put the corporate network at risk for viruses. The manager replied there was no cause for worry. "Technically they're not on your network; we have our own switch," De Brino recalls the manager saying. Engineering had built a whole rogue network.
The engineers thought the previous CIO had a propensity for shooting down projects, so they learned the art of stealth. Even once De Brino came on as the new CIO, they continued their covert ways by secretly expensing motherboards and hiding servers under their desks. But ironically, the rogue private network was a good idea. It allowed software developers to test code before launching it on the corporate network.
De Brino held out the stick before offering the carrot to make the carrot more appetizing. He remembers telling them, "Your choices are, we're going to take the servers and confiscate them -- they're corporate assets that aren't being managed -- or let us adopt them to our standards. We'll give you guys full access." The engineering manager agreed to the latter plan. As part of his effort to build a rapport with the rogues, De Brino didn't tell his boss: "My boss would have gone ballistic, [saying], 'There's assets we don't know about?'"
Juliano, of course, wasn't so lucky. After his CEO berated him at 3 a.m. for downed email and the marketing department blamed him, Juliano faced an uphill battle to build rapport. So he turned to booze. The marketing and IT teams went out to "quite a few after-work beer bashes," Juliano says. Did it help? "Absolutely." (Now Juliano is CIO and vice president of marketing for Wine Enthusiast Cos., a midmarket company that sells wine accessories, publishes wine magazines and arranges conferences. It is based in Elmsford, N.Y.)
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