Apr 10, 2002
Does Your Company Need a CTO?

More and more firms are hiring chief technical officers to help them understand and respond to technological change.

The economy may have slowed down, but that doesn't mean the pace of technological change has abated. If anything, choices about technology are getting harder to make -- you have a smaller budget to work with and more options for how to spend it. Upgrade your network infrastructure to gigabit Ethernet speeds or install a slower, wireless network? Centralize data on a storage area network or distribute it throughout the company on network-attached devices? Build brand-new Web applications or Webify your existing infrastructure using portal software?

In many cases, such decisions can have far-reaching effects on your company's competitiveness, cost structure, and bottom line. That's why an increasing number of companies are hiring chief technical officers to keep an eye on the big picture. This week, more than 270 of them gathered in San Francisco at the CTO Forum, a conference sponsored by the technology industry weekly InfoWorld (where I was formerly an editor).

Among the attendees, there was, not surprisingly, a lot of agreement about the strategic importance of having a CTO. (After all, who's going to knock his or her own job?) But just what a CTO is supposed to do is a bit less clear-cut. Until the mid-1990s, the position existed almost exclusively at software companies, where this individual served as a bridge between the engineering department and the rest of the business. CTOs were part technology evangelist, part master product architect. But with the rise of the Internet, CTOs started appearing in businesses outside the software industry, because every company, whether it sold printers or pet food, needed technology to gain a foothold on the Web.

These days even a startup will hire a CTO as part of its founding management team. That person designs the company's network and server setup. Once everything is up and running, the company often brings in a chief information officer -- someone with the slightly more humdrum responsibility of maintaining the system. That frees up the CTO to keep thinking big.

"What companies are finding is that to remain competitive you really need to innovate on the technical front, and that's the role of the CTO," says Ari Kahn, CTO and co-founder of Fatwire, a content management software vendor. "Companies don't necessarily want to stay in a mature market and slug it out on pure market share -- they want to be able to move into new areas."

For the complete story: http://www.business2.com/articles/web/0,1653,39638,FF.html

Publication: Business 2.0
Dylan Tweeney