1. Phil Windley's Technometria | CIO vs. CTO Page 1 of 1
CIO vs. CTO
7 One of the questions I hear with some frequency is
diggs “what’s the difference between a CIO and a CTO?”
Having been both, I think I have some insights that
digg it might be helpful.
First let me talk about what I think they have in common:
In both jobs, a key role is helping technologists
understand what the business needs and helping the
business understand what the technology can do for
them.
Both roles require a strong technologist with a strong
grasp of business (kind of a corollary to the last point,
but slightly different).
Both should be strategic thinkers.
Both should be excellent leaders.
Now for their differences:
I see a CTO as primarily focused on the top line while
the CIO is primarily focused on the bottom line. There’s
some cross over, but I think this is a valid distinction.
A CTO is primarily concerned with external products and
customers while a CIO is primarily concerned with
running the business (internal products and customers).
In an ideal world, the CTO runs the product
development organization while the CIO runs the IT
organization.
If you have to choose, being a strong technologist is
more important for the CTO, while being a good
manager is more important for the CIO.
A CIO has to be operational and understand how
to build repeatable processes, reliable systems, and the
organization to run them. A CTO doesn’t necessarily
have to have these skill if backed up by a strong
operational person in the role of CIO.
A large technology oriented company (more than a few
hundred employees) should have both. There’s too much to
do for one person and the thinking can be very different.
One of the big problems at Excite@Home was they never
had someone at the “C” level who was looking internally.
“IT” was a division (not even a VP slot) inside the larger
technology organization. There were four levesl between this
director and the CEO. The result was real chaos in the
internal systems and operations areas. The CTO was a
brilliant technologist, but not very “operational” and
consequently, repeatable processes were hard to find.
Personally I’ve enjoyed both roles, but I found the challenges
to be very different.
http://www.windley.com/archives/2002/12/cio_vs_cto.shtml 5/9/2008