I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with the CTO role and its many interpretations. The main thing that attracts me to this job is that companies and their management teams that incorporate the CTO role recognise the importance of technology in almost every aspect of businesses, and cover these responsibilities at the highest level of decision making. What I think can be improved is getting a clearer view on the responsibilities and creating a better match between the role and the person that is assigned that role.
As the footprint of both operational software and internal product development responsibilities in almost every organisation has rapidly increased in the last decades, so have the demands for this leadership position and the governance over everything related to technology. This applies to both small, medium and big organisations and have created many, often conflicting and confusing variants of the job descriptions of this container job of “CTO” or “CIO”.
For instance, I love how most typical descriptions of responsibilities for the Chief Information Officer and Chief Technology Officer seem to overlap a lot, but that the CIO role is often used in more traditional industries, whereas the CTO role is more often used in product based tech companies. In the agency world the role of CTO is often a double role as interim CTO or CTO sparring partner at clients, and internally responsible for the technology used for client work by the team.
In startups and smaller product companies the CTO is often the engineer that created most of the product, and more often than not this person is more interested in building and innovation, rather than covering the complete breadth of responsibilities that come with handling all operational information, tools and technology. In more classical industries, the CIO is often focused on the internally used operational software and change management, rather than innovation and product development.
What I think is important to take away from this, is that there are many ways of interpreting this role, and that the scope and focus of the role depend heavily on the size and phase of the organisation. What I do know is that no matter what phase, there should at least be an awareness and preferably a vision and policy about a wide range of topics, that I believe need to be covered by a CIO, a CTO or the person responsible for both roles:
- strategic alignment
- technology leadership
- talent management
- cybersecurity
- product development
- innovation
- budget management and resource allocation
- vendor & partner management
- risk management
- data management and analysis
- governance and compliance
- change management
I’ll be putting my further elaborations on these topics to paper and share them in future posts, but if one of these terms has you completely blindsided, definitely ask your CTO / CIO about it and get in touch if you need help covering them.
Big shoutout and thank you to the CTO’s and CIO’s that have shaped this view during my career, I’ve learned much from each and every one of you even although our interactions may have been brief:
- Frank Wammes from my formative capgemini years
- Maurice Faber from a first big consultancy project to ideology driven work
- Ivo Jansch through facilitating multiple conference and meetup speaking opportunities
- Wouter Danes for the next phase after a startup MVP
- Rob van der Burgt for showing openness as CTO to discussion with peers
- Hylke Sprangers for an introduction to the cto topics and mediatech
- Wouter de Winter for showing how to collaborate with agencies
- Ronald Renes from insights into lowcode at scale in industrial market
- Marisa Cheung San for transparent and calm overview of change
- Martijn Schouten for the example of the next generation of CTO’s
- Jürgen Vogel for sharing a journey
- Ralph Reijs for delivering value as
C*Oin short cycles