CTO: The most demanding position in the modern enterprise
CTO: The most demanding position in the modern enterprise
Technology appears to be progressing exponentially, users are more demanding and CTOs find themselves on the backfoot. CTOs need help, here's why.
Are you a CTO, or do you know a CTO who feels squeezed by the increasing demands of the role? This is a common feeling among CTOs I meet. For some, it's the challenge of being newer to the role, having risen through the ranks. For others, they wonder what has changed and why they are now feeling this way. This is the focus of this post. Note: For this publication, I will include the CIO role when I refer to CTO as the range of responsibilities for both roles can vary significantly across organisations, but regardless, the trends I describe in this post are often relevant to both roles.
Every department across the organisation now has sophisticated needs. Every user’s expectations are rising fast, and they seem unhappier than ever. The pace of change is increasing. All these factors put the CTO at the centre of a significant crush of expectations, unmet needs, conflicting priorities and burning platforms. How are we expected to cope? How do we get back to being proactive about what we do and not reactive to the latest crisis or unhappy stakeholders or customers?
In today’s post, I will expand further on what I can see as an emerging trend, both from my experience as a CTO/CIO and through my work with organisations, especially CTOs.
But first, a bit about me…
To give a little perspective on where I am coming from and my opportunities to observe this phenomenon, I will share a bit about what I have done over my career, mainly what I have been up to lately.
I've been coaching technology leaders for a significant portion of my career. I’ve done this both as a responsibility for my leadership roles. I’ve also coached technology leaders as an extracurricular pastime, particularly coaching startup founders for at least a dozen startups. More recently, on a contract basis, I have focused on coaching CTOs, contributing as a fractional CTO and supporting other executive-level people responsible for or interacting with technology.
In my consulting work, I also work with executives on technology strategy, improving developer experience, operational performance, goal setting, product management, and a range of other subject matter for which I provide a full service, from conducting the research to presenting the findings and supporting the implementation of recommendations.
Through this work and my past career experience, I’ve worked with a fascinating cross-section of organisations spanning diverse sectors and experiencing many knotty problems. And yet the most common challenges in Technology within each of these organisations have so many points of commonality. Technology leaders feel overworked and under-appreciated. From their stakeholders’ perspectives, they are often seen to be falling short of expectations or standing in the way of progress. It is a depressing situation as, in almost all cases, the CTO was once the champion of progress.
An emerging trend
CTOs are feeling rising expectations and frustrated users and stakeholders in all directions. What worked before is falling short. They don’t feel in control of their own time, and the rapid growth of new challenges outpaces every bit of progress. How do we deal with the step-change in Data Privacy expectations? The rise of CyberSecurity threats? The ease with which new technology enters an organisation, whether authorised or not. The rising expectations of users. The pace at which technology becomes considered legacy. How critical technology has become for all functions of an organisation to operate.
The causes for these growing pressures are these reasons:
The experience of using consumer technology has improved so rapidly that it puts a lot of pressure on what is expected from enterprise software.
Technology has become central to every function of an organisation.
The pace of innovation has led to many disruptive technologies impacting product development and enterprise Information Technology simultaneously, e.g. pervasive internet, cloud computing, granular integration patterns, continuous delivery, AI, speech recognition and voice synthesis, the breadth of commodity automation solutions…
What I have come to identify is a growing need for support mechanisms for CTOs, including coaching. I have a theory on why this need is growing.
In the modern era of technology, with technology permeating every discipline and the progress of consumer technology raising expectations of enterprise technology dramatically, it's easy for CTOs to find themselves on the back foot. Arguably, given this, the CTO role is now one of the most challenging.
Given this conclusion and the nature of the causes of these challenges, which are having the effect of needing to fight battles on many fronts, the modern CTO needs the support of people who have faced these challenges before and navigated these challenges successfully, such that most effort and attention was able to be shifted towards proactive improvement and enablement of the organisation and away from reactive fire-fighting.
How this trend is shaping this publication
I am finding more CTOs who need support. In response, I have experimentally retitled my publication ‘Great CTOs Focus on Outcomes’. Although many topics are more broadly relevant to a broader range of roles than just CTOs (and will continue to be), when you consider all the content I’ve published, the audience that all of the content is relevant for is the CTO.
That the content is all relevant to CTOs is unsurprising; it is the common thread of my last few full-time roles, such as when I was both the CTO & CIO for Seek Asia, CPTO for recruitment startup Weirdly and ‘Director of Product Development & Operations’ for Consumer Insights with Experian Marketing Services. My consulting work over the past couple of years has been focused at the Executive leader level, especially CTOs.
I will monitor to see if this helps CTOs find the content relevant to them and connect them to things they can try to have more impact and regain a sense of making strategic proactive efforts that are effective at improving how people leverage technology or interact with products and services at their organisations.
What I can offer as former CTO and current CTO coach
Over the past couple of years, since those full-time roles, I’ve worked as a consultant; I’ve worked with executives making significant decisions relating to Technology, leveraging my extensive experience leading teams and making strategic decisions across a range of contexts: enterprise and startup, corporate and government, across many industries and sectors. I can be engaged through the consultancy I work for, HYPR if you’d like access to the broader range of support they offer, or I can be hired independently. I can also provide a group CTO coaching opportunity where you can join an existing group of CTOs to leverage the breadth of experiences from various perspectives.
When I coach, I cover everything from the foundations of effective time management as an executive leader to establishing an adaptive technology strategy, framing critical decisions about what to build, buy and rent, and supporting engineers, analysts and other technical talent on being inspired and productive and realising Senge's vision of a learning organisation. There are many skills to succeed and responsibilities to cover as a modern CTO. It has become essential not only to deliver but to do so in a manner that addresses needs and expectations at the pace of change facing organisations.
My approach is to coach you on your issues and context, not on a fixed set of ‘best practices’ (of course, I have a range of practices I believe are relevant for certain situations). When options are needed, I can share battle-tested approaches I've used to successfully move from a reactive to a proactive stance as a CTO. How to shift from frustrated users of software to satisfied users. How to make progress and live up to the wide breadth of expectations of the modern CTO.
My recent focus has been coaching and supporting CTOs and helping them navigate the changes and challenges described in this post. I have a full slate of work. If you would like support when I become available, reach out now.
Whilst I have a full coaching roster, my perspectives on a wide range of topics relevant to CTOs are available in my publication 'Great CTOs Focus on Outcomes’. Subject to availability, I am always happy to connect and coach on spot issues or, when there are more significant challenges, begin an ongoing coaching engagement with you when a slot opens. Feel free to reach out and explore the fit.