Capgemini’s Global Chief Technology Officer, Andy Mulholland explains the DNA of the CTO’s role, why it differs from that of the CIO and how it can deliver a ‘Change the Game’ opportunity for companies.

 

There is often a degree of confusion between the role of the Chief Information Officer (CIO) and that of the Chief Technology Officer (CTO). Some consider the two roles to be synonymous, when actually they’re different in terms of their skills, motivations and requirements: their DNA’s simply don’t match.

Going back to basics, the job requirements of a CIO are to manage a successful IT deployment, run it as a business and keep it running. As a CTO, my driver is to understand the impact of new and changing technologies and see how the company can integrate these technologies into the business. The new technology could be anything from MashUps, Wikis, or Blogs, to location-based services, new activity streams and mobile presence software such as Jaiku.

 

A fundamental understanding of technology and how it can benefit the business as a whole. The CTO must be able to not only understand how the technology works but be able to communicate it in a way that other people within the business can understand it too.

People may be doing their day job but at the same time they have a lot of things going on around technology generally that are continually broadening their experiences. We are living in a business landscape where there are key drivers such as globalisation - who’s employing who and where; and people, who are now familiar, even adept at new technologies such Web 2.0 (and before long the Semantic Web, Web 3.0) and Service Oriented Architectures (SOA).

The CTO is the person in the company that can make technology accessible to both groups by matching the existing and emerging technologies to the business’s needs.

 

Innovation is a much-used – and abused - word, but most organisations are now demanding innovation as an integral part of their business processes and this is where the CTO plays a key role. Innovation is based on the business’s capability to recognise that a new group of technologies coupled with its acceptance and up-take by a wide range of consumers can create new markets. It is the CTO’s role to understand these technologies, and their possibilities.

Successful CTOs are thinking like magpies about being a catalyst for change and how to apply it. So, they’re not inherently ‘Board people’ who are themselves thinking about shareholder value.

I’m a firm believer in the fact that when you see the right change it’s immediately obvious, and you say to yourself, “Duh, why didn’t I think of that?” When you’ve made the connection, the right way forward is self-evident: you don’t have to push the pea up the hill with your nose. Take MashUps, for example. There is a great similarity between the MashUp and the PC’s killer app: the spreadsheet. The spreadsheet was personal, created and shared by PC enthusiasts and more importantly, completely invisible to the corporate data centre. MashUps are on a similar path: rapidly increasing in usage and shared by people and again, are almost completely invisible to the corporate IT department.

 

What ‘technologists’ like us must do is to knock politely on the Boardroom door, say ‘we can help you change the game’ and listen carefully to the reply. By inspiring the Boardroom to think about innovating the business model, we can help our companies to gain access to new customers and markets.