A Damp day in Hull

It was a 5 am start to the week, but the rain made it feel more like winter, which takes the pleasure away from the 3 hour drive. A day in the office today, so chance to discuss topics with colleagues and generally update each other on what we are doing. It sparks many different conversations on different topics. The one thing you miss working from home.

CTO or CIO who holds the power

The role of IT is changing and it is moving towards a period of transition to a position where IT is embedded in the organisation, and is managed more locally by the people it is designed to help, but still needs the holistic cross departmental perspective. This transition I believe will be the catalyst for the clarification of the roles of CIO and CTO, which is currently not clearly defined (in fact the organisational structure is very haphazard and examples of the CTO reporting to CIO and visa versa are common). We believe that the office of the CTO should include the architecture, strategy, research and development, and planning operations, while the CIO should be responsible for the delivery of IT as a service to their customers as efficiently and effectively as possible, and be focused on the extraction of business value from the IT resources. The CIO will need to have a voice in the office of the CTO so that operational considerations are taken in to account when designing the architecture in the future.

However, given that the two roles are addressing different needs, and therefore have different agendas, we believe that the current arrangement (as haphazard as it is) is not sustainable in the long term; we consider the two roles need to be separated and not be part of the same department: this would enable the forward looking strategic decisions to be made taking all aspects of organisational needs in to account (IT, people, culture, money and market forces), and operational effectiveness be the prime consideration of the CIO, while the CTO is more focused on the technology and the architecture in particular.