What would be my responsibilities as the CTO of your business?

What would be my responsibilities as the CTO of your business?

I see the primary responsibility of the Chief Technology Officer of a business to be that of education through communication. Technology is of little use to a business without education in its proper use within a business.

Education and communication of technology begins with knowing and conveying. A CTO must know how their company works, how products are developed and sold to their customers through company channels, how goods and services are obtained from vendors and how the business thrives within its own community of both workers and investors.

Technology ranges from a benefit to a curse on businesses in that it involves change. Change causes disturbances in business process. Change causes work to be interrupted, communications to be broken and costs to rise. Too much change will damage a business so severely as to not be able to recover from the changes. Change brought on by technology is often feared by those who are not educated as to the benefits of the technology and left only to become suspicious of how technology will harm them in their business.

Educations starts with communication between the CTO and all teams the technological changes will impact. A CTO must communicate honestly with all parties on how they will affected by changes in technology used by the business.

A CTO’s own education does not stop when hired. A CTO needs to understand the business environments in which technology will be used. How technology will improve and harm the business, its investors, workers, management, suppliers, customers and its local community.

First a CTO must know the business so as to act as part leader, executive, advocate and just a bit the mad genius to bring the benefits of technology. As leader the CTO must lead teams to better understand how technology will benefit them. As an executive the CTO must be able to make good business decisions on which technologies will be bring to the company advantages. A CTO must be an advocate for the right changes in technology for a business. Finally the CTO will need to be part mad genius to assist company teams on their voyages of discovery to profit from the use of available technology.

Contrary to popular thinking I do not belief that a CTO should be the owner of the technology in the business rather the caretaker of the technology. As a caretaker the CTO can see that good choices are made as to interoperability between teams is maintained. As caretaker the CTO should maintain the relationships with vendors and suppliers of technology for the company. Individual teams within the company should be responsible for use of the technology they need. 

Being CTO does not mean centralizing the power of technology within the business rather it means expanding the power of teams to use technology do their work better in their own way. If you put control over the Sales departments servers under the CTO then every problem or failure in sales will become a failure of the CTO. Giving support to but control over their own technology to the Sales team needs to do it job means the people who know the problem best will take responsibility for the problem. While the equipment and the services might be owned by the CTO, to maintain interoperability,  the running of the equipment and software must be owned by the Sales department. The sales DBA must work for the Sales department so they will become part of the team and exist only as an intruder, some would say spy, from the office of the CTO.

Communications systems, networks and telephony, fall under the prevue of the CTO in that the technology updates often and interoperability needs to be maintained across the business. But is there one single telephone that is best for the entire company or a single telephone service that can work for the factory floor and the mobile sales force. No, there is none. 

Voice communications have changed greatly of late in that the cost and quality of voice telephony has wavered much. A poor quality codec in a noisy environment is a safety hazard. Poor quality VoIP compression when making a sales call causes confusion in the customer.

Secure network communications, Internet, email, web presence, voice, video, file transfers need to be maintained. Internal networks must be secured from threats from both inside and outside the business. Again each department’s needs are specific to that department such that they must be able to define, control and support their needs within their department. How can this be done while maintaining security and interoperability in a business which moves physical resources and personnel about to fit either the needs of the business or the physical plant? Does the CTO allow web surfing on the same network which handles billing transactions and VoIP because it is convenient or simply too difficult to figure out a better way?

The CTO must be able to balance the costs of security, opportunity and complexity against the ability of the business to be successful. Security is the responsibility of every team within a business.