Have you harkened to the call of the bugle? Are you falling in neatly beneath the chief executive’s battle standard?

Have you got the message yet that this is war? The global economies as we knew them are crumbling round our ears in a cataclysmic slide that will leave no one untouched on the battlefields of the world’s financial markets. It’s a war you have to participate in, in order to be a winner. Its not a time to attempt neutrality or sit on the fence as a interested observer. Its no time for pacifism or conscientious objection.

 But - and treble but as the Bard would have it - it is NOT a war against your own business and colleagues in the business. You are about to demonstrate your value, valour and indomitable spirit (was stretching for another jingoistic ‘v’ word and, in failing, became impaled on the horns of my own verbosity) to the entire enterprise of which you, as a key IT staff member, are going to demonstrate via guerrilla tactics that your team is absolutely intrinsic to the success and wellbeing of the company you work for.

You will achieve this by proving that information technology is a profit centre not a just a sunk cost.

The internal political shenanigans that will inhibit your road to this acceptance will be as rocky and interminable as you allow it to be. Remember that guerrilla tactics are about mobility, speed of effective response to changing situations and the ability to blend in with your environment. Therefore it is imperative to dress the part, speak the language and intelligently react to any situation that presents itself. Show your mettle and take your true place in the Council of War.

Because as von Clausewitz says: ‘Once barriers - which in a sense only exist in man's ignorance of the possible - are torn down, they are not easily set up again.’