What's a CTO to do?

In my work as a consultant, I'm finding that there is an increasing niche for the role of a Consulting CTO. Rather than employ a full-time Chief Technology Officer, some smaller organisations and start-ups find it more cost effective to have a CTO on tap.

It's worth making the distinction here between a CTO and someone who's simply technically very strong. A lot of start-ups have brilliant engineers who often find themselves in the role of CTO, but without the business and strategy background that's so important to the role. This can lead to conflict between the engineering team and the management team, which can be exacerbated if the management team is not as tech savvy as they could be.

To highlight one particular point: the CTO should really not be the Chief Architect. However, quite often the person in the role of CTO is actually the best engineer in the start-up, or the founder with the technology background, or something of this nature. Sure, they are technically brilliant, but just as often, have no clue about business or strategy.

I see Architecture as just one of 7 disciplines that a strong CTO needs to be on top of. The Disciplines are:

1. Strategy


2. Architecture


3. Infrastructure


4. Product


5. People


6. Program


7. Process

I know that Customer is not in that list - and that's intentional because I think that they are so important they need a specific focus. There's elements of customer in all of the 7 disciplines listed above - the trick is working out which customer.

In a future post I will examine each one of these disciplines and try to pose some questions that asoftware start-up CTO should be able to answer, and that a CEO (or board) should be asking.

M@