In this episode, Nicole Grimm and Ben Rockey discuss the two sides of the IS leadership coin. That of the roles of the CIO and the CTO and what each role brings to your business.
Mayhem and MISfits Episode 5 - “What is in a name?”
Transcript
Nicole Grimm
Hello and welcome. My name is Nicole Grimm.
Ben Rockey
And I'm Ben Rockey.
Nicole Grimm
And this is mayhem and misfits where we take a fun look at business gone awry. And the systems that save them. Today we're going to discuss the two sides of the IS leadership coin. The role of the CIO versus a CTO. And the differences between them.
Ben Rockey
Is a tricky coin to flip.
Speaker
This with.
Nicole Grimm
Specially when these are people and leadership coins.
Ben Rockey
They're really hard to flip. They better be gymnastics. That's involved.
Speaker
Right?
Nicole Grimm
Then why should we care? About the difference. Besides, you know one letter being off between them.
Ben Rockey
Why should you care? About a CIO and a CTO? That's a good. That's a good question. Well.
Nicole Grimm
We should probably start with what they stand for.
Ben Rockey
All right, what do they stand for?
Nicole Grimm
The CIO would be a Chief Information Officer and the CTO would be a Chief Technical officer or I think you know of another word for that, right?
Ben Rockey
Chief technology officer.
Nicole Grimm
Either one. So why don't you get started on the leadership portion of it? You have some ideas around that.
Ben Rockey
Yeah, so why do? Why do we even care about a CIO and a CTO? Well, in your business you you care about your business and if you care about your business, you know you need leadership. So in your business you've got some. Responsibilities assigned some accountability. Assigned over managing operations and product and services. You've you've got someone over finances and accounting handling. You know billing APR invoicing right? You have someone, possibly over your human resources needs. And those are all you know, managerial leaderships, but it's probably likely that you also have. Leaders who are involved in making sure each of those areas are really effective for your business. As the business gets more strategically focused. More driven towards how to grow those areas of the business tend to get larger and have more needs and have even more need for leadership to make sure that they're being aligned. It's not uncommon. For information systems and information technology to get overlooked in that paradigm shift. If you will. And so considering having a CIO or a CTO. To lead. Your technology needs and we'll talk about how you know what, what version you need in a moment, but step one is acknowledging that you need someone over. That area of the business.
Nicole Grimm
Right at certain sizes we may talk about, there might be examples often where you have too many moving parts for any one person to handle. Technology is often intertwined into every aspect of the business these days, right? There's the HR leaders that you mentioned would have their own system. The operations would have their own system to track everything that you're manufacturing, processing. Getting out the door. Your sales staff may have their own customer relationship. Each of these systems all intertwined, needing to talk to each other, and it starts to get more than any one person could handle, or more than anyone leader should be. Necessarily accountable or focused on the. Role of an executive suite in this arena, whether it be a CIO or CTO. Has an overarching and interrelated. Responsibility to make sure that all these things are working together. Towards the means and goals of the overall business.
Ben Rockey
Right, it's important to have. Someone assign the accountability of maintaining those areas of business. You don't want your operations team having to worry about filing taxes at the end of the year, and you don't want. Your finance. Team most likely doing any operational planning for supply chain needs. You want people along those teams. Who have the responsibility and accountability and awareness and development to know what to look for, what to plan for experiences from other locations to best implement whatever the needs of the business are. And with that. That next level up of how do you get all those teams to work together? In most businesses you have some type of executive leadership, some type of space where managers come together and try to build that bridge. But operationally, day-to-day it really comes from having connected systems. Who's managing your connective systems? Are you even thinking of terms of those connected subsystems between your operations team and your finance team? And more than just is the e-mail working who's actually pulling that data together and making sure it's useful and ensuring that that system is staying stable and it's feeding both your customers? And your team appropriately.
Nicole Grimm
Right, that jumps right into the mayhem. So if you have strategic leadership and oversight in those. My, I guess traditional areas of business with finance operations if you will. You may have some. Disparate systems disconnected things going on in the business that are signifying to you that you may be able to use some leadership in this area. Perhaps there's one area of the business that gets. An uneven amount of attention. For example, maybe if you have compliance or food safety, and that's a critical point, or you've had some issues in the past, there they may have a robust system to facilitate the reporting to the government so you don't get shut down for an example. But maybe your maintenance department. Is still operating on sticky notes and Excel spreadsheets because they haven't necessarily gotten that. That notification, or that attention, let's say. In the role of leadership within this space. You would have. Some oversight into that and imbalance. Of it, so you may have disparate systems systems that aren't talking to each other. They're in their own little silo, managing their own thing, but it's not necessarily broadcasting or sharing information that could be helpful for other departments to react to. Maybe a low trust in systems that you do have where people don't necessarily trust it. It tends to give a lot of errors or it's down a lot. Maybe you even have poor reporting in those siloed systems that you have where they're not giving a lot of output or communications to other areas that would be assigned a symptom of maybe poor reporting. Maybe the system isn't actually tracking what's important to you at the moment. Or isn't able to? Flex or adapt to the latest needs of the company and the latest reports are taking a long time. Those might be some examples of what it looks. Like to have this piece missing in the business. Any other ones Ben?
Ben Rockey
I think that pretty well defines what's out there. The the the big highlight of this is who's actually looking out for building integration, ensuring stability. Building intelligence driving forward with what the business is trying to achieve. Looking out for solutions that can actually improve. How the systems deliver what they need to to the rest of the business.
Nicole Grimm
Right managing vendors, coordinating vendors, holding them to a higher standard. And even holding the internal business to a higher standard, right challenging the status quo. Holding them to a standard that. You see in other. Areas or you see in other examples, maybe you see something as a technical leader. Really innovative. In your most recent vacation on an airline or something like that, and it triggers an idea that the company that you are facilitating or assisting can adopt or start to work in that way, or become even leaders in the space offering technology or different things to customers or into. That others in the business aren't start to differentiate your business from others. So I go with that. We could jump into. What does it look like with it? What is the misfit?
Ben Rockey
With what we've described as this pain. The way to ease. It is through a CIO or CTO who can focus on those needs of the business. So Chief Information Officer, Chief Technical or Technology officer, depending on which one you want to use. The titles themselves. Don't necessarily. Explain what they are, and oftentimes CIO and CTO have been used interchangeably with a lot of organizations today as we move as the positions mature, they have each taken on a different meaning and different interpretation. You might believe they're the kind of the same role, but. But they do have some. Some clear focuses that pull them to different areas of the business. A business can use as CIO and CTO to do just about whatever they want. A name can just be a name. They do have a lot of similarities. Both should be a part of your executive team or your leadership team contributing to and enabling your strategies. Your goals that you have for the business. They should be able to bring to bear their experience and and their background and their and their area of study to helping the business. Develop both have to have broad technical backgrounds to do that, and they both need a focus on innovation. Both positions need to understand the application of technology and the business while maintaining compliance needs. Security needs, sustainability needs of those systems. And compliance can be things like worrying about when you file your taxes is there. Is there a certification process we have to go through every year to make sure that we can sell these food products? They have a responsibility to keep those systems integrated to deliver on that information, security is paramount, I think with everyone being aware of constant spamming attacks and. And the like to get into your systems. It's their accountable, their CIO or CTO is accountable for ensuring they have everything in place to protect against that. As well as sustainability in the context of making sure your systems can stay on line under as many. Unplanned situations as possible, both should be splitting time between working on the business and in the business. And both positions are change agents, because if you're looking for innovation, you have to have leaders who can actually progress forward with whatever your business plans are. The CIO role, though, has an internal focus. The CIO is focused on supporting and developing solutions to support the staff and the functional areas of the business, like operations or supply chain or sales or finance. The CTO, this chief Technology officer role. Has an external focus. The CTO is focused on innovating solutions that create a competitive advantage in the company's product or service. The CTO. Focus is actually what's being delivered to the customer or the CIO. Focus is on delivering solutions to the business. In both situations, both the business and the customer are served in each role, but one coming at it from an internal perspective and the others coming at it from an external perspective.
Nicole Grimm
Right? The continuous improvement can happen on both sides. But it's worth focusing on the focus portion. So they can. Both look at the opposite side, but they traditionally try to come from One Direction or the other, so acio. Facilitate a customer need through improvement internally. We'll give an example. Of sometimes both may produce a portal for the customers to see what their status order is, or even some vendors in our. Expertise or in our space where we tend to help agriculture or food products or manufacturing, they might have some reports that's going out to vendors and customers. However, one would focus more on what is the experience the customer is getting out of whatever service we're offering. Getting more out of the delivery of it as CTO would make sure there's. Focus on that customer experience and that they're getting things that they would expect or demand or innovating. That space, a good example of this would be if you were a printing company. People could translate that they if you are making a printer. The printer having certain functionalities or certain features. On the shelf. Will entice the customer to purchase that object and they have to make sure that they're on the leading edge and maybe even the bleeding edge of offering those customers those. Functionality's in that product line as CIO. On the other hand. Through this same kind of portal might be internally focused and making sure that they're answering to what the customer service representatives are constantly answering for customers or vendors. Let's put that on a portal so they can do self-service and look it up on their own, not necessarily being on that front leading edge of trying to. Answer to customers wants and whims to making their product or service stronger.
Ben Rockey
And I think that highlights an important point. Certain businesses could have both positions filled. You can be a business with both a CIO and a CTO 1 focused internally, 1 focused, focused externally for this very reason.
Nicole Grimm
Right, if you're a highly mature organization, I think we have an example we've led with on other episodes around Domino's Pizza as an example.
Ben Rockey
Yeah, Domino's we talked about before they made this massive push into changing how they connected with customers and changing how they connected with the franchisees. And the and the pizza restaurants. By providing a portal process and technology process to make it very simple for a customer to order what they. And have it delivered how they want to deliver it and paid for it under whatever platform they want to pay for it, and be updated by it. That whole layer was pushed by their chief technology officer, the Chief technology officer was focused on all those components of technology that enabled a new experience for the customer. At the same time, they have a CIO who was focused on making sure that they needed to maintain the server environments and office environments and the technology in place to actually support the business from the store to the corporate offices. Now recently overtime the CIO retired. The CTO took over the CEO spot. Domino's made a decision to just have one role, but the CIO's responsibilities folded underneath the CTO, and they still have an IS organization that operates separately from the technology aspects of Domino's.
Nicole Grimm
Right, if you are a large. Or complex enough business it may make. Sense to have both or. Swing one way or the other. Sometimes we'll use the example if you're not quite sure if you're a technology company or a widget company. It's a blurred line between the two. You may lean, possibly more towards the CTO, maybe if you're a startup and you launched with an AB. If you will, then maybe you're focused more on that CTO and that delivery. Of your service through technology very distinctly through technology, you may lean that way versus mother. So I think. This is a good point to kind of dive into the CTO and then we can dive in a bit into the CIO to really. Fill out this picture and paint the differences between them.
Ben Rockey
Right, what? How do I decide? What kind of role am I looking for to fill my organization so? The CTO, the Chief Technology officer. As we've said, their mindset is more focused on the customer. They're there to actually enable innovation around the product and what the and the service the business is selling. They have a very high tolerance for risk. There they know how to adapt to failure as they're producing. Some type of product, some type of service for the customer. These things have to be prototyped. They have to be tried out and marketed to see if the customer is going to bite. If it's going to meet the customers needs, is it something the customer wants to buy? As with any product development that can be a very. Very challenging experience to work through, and if you're not someone who, with the ability to adapt and to accept that risk, there could be a very challenging role. So one of the mindsets of of a CTO is someone who can. Live with that flux. By the same token, they also need to be an innovator. They have to be someone who can think big and apply technologies in a way. That haven't been done before to build a competitive advantage for the business. To do that, they end up leading the development teams and engineering teams of your business. The teams that are there to build the product or create the service or maintain the service that serves your customers. That's what the CTO is. Primary focus is over is that externally facing delivery system. They use their ability to enhance the company's product offerings. They focus on the customer. They look for new and cutting edge technologies to improve their product. And they're always focused on pushing forward the business strategy through the product innovation.
Nicole Grimm
Right, they may have. That is their baseline and then on this side they can support the internal operations if you will. With that focus, maybe the CTO has some sort of a background in sales interacting with customers. They may be a bit more. Sales focused or externally focused in their experience as well. So on the CIO side, we might see the opposite, where they might have some more finance experience that have bled into a CIO role in this space. We may see some sales functionality or customer facing. Aspects of their experience.
Ben Rockey
A CTO will be if you you know the word vertical. They also may have a lot of experience with the product already selling. They may have if if it's uh building and designing technologies around. Implementing uh tractors or any type of agricultural product they may have already come from or been in a field associated with that or adjacent to it, whereas the CIO is coming from a more of a administrative business. Lee minded focus. So I guess that moves us into this.
Nicole Grimm
Right, that's a good point.
Ben Rockey
So that probably moves us into the CIO role. So with the CIO, and what is CIO? Mindset is is the CIO is a systems thinker. They are looking for ways to integrate and build across the business. They are absolutely looking for. Opportunities to apply business strategy to improvements in process. Between departments to make them move more integrated. Their mindset is definitely on continuous improvement. How do we grow that kind of lean thinking? If you will? They are functionally ministrative, since they are not directly contributing towards sales or operations, much more like. HR team or finance team as far as where they're positioned. But they do operate. Generally, from that executive level, because just like the CTO is trying to take strategy forward in product, the CIO is trying to take strategy forward through what systems are purchased and used to make the company function. At a higher level.
Nicole Grimm
Right, they would drive revenues. The CTO may drive revenue more, and the CIO would drive. An increase in profitability through efficiencies.
Ben Rockey
Right? The CIO does serve as the top technology infrastructure manager. The CEO runs the dev teams that are related to application development for internal applications. And the CIO would have all the responsibilities around maintaining the sustainability and the compliance and security of those internal systems.
Nicole Grimm
Right, having both of these positions filled in medium to large scale companies, does that make sense for this? Type of application? Or would you start with one? Versus the other.
Ben Rockey
If you need a CTO, there's a good chance you already know that you need a CTO because your product requires someone to take the leadership role over your technology. Most businesses, though, would adopt A CIO role. More broadly, big to small. Because the CIO, as we've said, is more administratively focused and looking for those internal improvements. Looking for someone who is not focused on what's being delivered, but on something to make the business more functional and essentially every business can take advantage of that. Which is why the CIO role CIO role. Tends to be. The world is easy, more easily adopted by a functionally any size business. It may not have the same title. You may not be a size that wants to take on C level C-Suite level titles but that. Person that can come in and fill the accountability needs of the CIO. Can be pretty broadly applied across any any side, any size business.
Nicole Grimm
Yeah, we may even say something to the extent of you know if you could clean up your own internal organization or have your house clean and organized, right? That would give you a good footing in order to take on external challenges and for example with the CTO. So on a CIO, if you kind of get your baseline. Cleaned up and you're getting your feet under you. Everything is integrated, the reporting is smooth, the everyone is getting enough. Even take of that technology. It's spread across the organization. Appropriately then you can start to take on and you're ready for the influx or demands that may come from a CTO type focus or taking on the. External responsibilities of. Driving innovation within your vertical or within your space if you will. Offering new right risks or that kind of thing to the core. Customer, it may be more risk full if you will. If you don't have internally, you're not ready to take on that role, but you're offering those challenges to your external market and it actually responds in a way that expects you to facilitate those demands that they're making of you. If you don't have your house organized, then you may not be able to. Respond as appropriate. It could be a. Big fail there.
Ben Rockey
The other thing that you know back to the mindset of the CIO CIO, the technology team, the Information Solutions team. Oftentimes, they're the ones that are best positioned to find those opportunities to make your business more streamlined, more efficient, more profitable, because they can see where the integration points are at. They're the ones who are most often working with the individuals of your company in their in. Their areas, whether it's. Transportation or supply chain or operations or accounting, or. You know, pick your, pick your point of the of the environment. Oftentimes it's a. It's a nice professional that sees the opportunity for improvement, and when they have a place to take it back to and they have a CIO type position that they can say hey, we see this opportunity for growth. Or if we bring in this kind. Of tool or application or if we make this kind of integration or we can provide this kind of reporting, it's going to make a 1 to 510% change in how we deliver our service or what can be accomplished. Those are the kinds of cost savings or cost gains. That a CIO can bring back to the back to the table.
Nicole Grimm
Right and spread. Across each of those. Leaderships that are facilitating their area, so I think. From within this space. If you have figured out, decided that. You could use some leadership and within this technical space, whether it be CIO or CTO, as we recommend, starting with the CIO might be one of the first places you could start. There's areas where you can take on. A smaller dose of this or bite off as much as you can chew if you will within a space. You don't have to go totally traditional and hire A CIO that sits on your board and has a desk and is there every single day and really jumps straight in that way. If that seems a bit overwhelming to you. As an organization, or maybe not even to you, but you know your organization may be challenged by that. Wave of innovation that comes walking in the door. There are different ways that you can facilitate this need. Try it out and get your feet under you to start crawling and then running. Some areas that we have identified would be. Anywhere from a fractional to a traditional. C-Suite in this space so fractional would be basically having a part time or a contracted role in this space. They would contribute to and enable the business strategy, but it's not all the time. Every time, all day. You can tailor how much of this role you would need based on your company's technical acumen or the readiness that your company has. We've seen this before in some areas where we help our customers and they may have only enough capacity to really take on so many projects or so much time. In any one space, maybe they. Need a bit more at a certain time because they're going to. Do a big. Huge system upgrade or they're putting in a a system that takes over the entire company, like an enterprise resource project.
Ben Rockey
Yeah, NetSuite or dynamics?
Nicole Grimm
Something for that degree.
Ben Rockey
Something like that.
Nicole Grimm
Right, they know they have a huge thing coming and they need that leadership for that portion. Another idea is to have a virtual CIO. Which is another space that you can kind of look throughout the world and offer this virtual space where you might meet on time. Or you might meet online and consult or contract with someone who can give you that general guidance and strategic leadership from that level. Then you kind of have the world at your fingertips if you will to get different ideas and have. Different innovation spaces where you might have somebody who has a really different. Experience that maybe you have somebody who was. I don't know making automobiles, and yeah, you're making tractors, but you kind of want to make them think the same or kind of bridge that gap between like the inefficiencies that are built into the automotive industry into the tractor industry for example. Another example would be the interim CIO. Maybe this is a space where you've had a CIO or you had that leadership. Or maybe it was even built into someone. Maybe you had a really strong CFO that had a CIO background, something like that where you were able to bridge that gap a bit more. And if you've lost that role for any number of reasons, you can have this interim both flex between this fractional or virtual framework. That can bridge that gap until you find someone who's a longer term fit. We've helped companies along those lines to where they know they want to establish. This new internal management, but they would like help. Kind of sourcing it, interviewing, facilitating that, but in the meantime they do need to kind of start to get their feet under them, or they have a project that's demanding an immediate reaction. To this void that they have in leadership. And then of course you end with. A traditional CIO, which would be a full time employee which is there to facilitate the company really build those relationships with the other C suites or other different leadership roles that you have in the company. Helps the business day-to-day. Helps a ES staff that you might have internally. Or even consistent. Relationships that you have with external vendors too. There's basically a full time load that needs to happen there, and there is a constant feedback of accountability for business strategy that you may have as an organization. So there's different ways that you can take this on. Depending on how much you're ready for it.
Ben Rockey
I think that's the big question, right? How do you know what you're ready for it if you don't know what you don't know yet, then we would definitely lead you towards the idea of starting with a virtual CIO. Start the engagement start to understand how you can incorporate those skill sets into your organization and the beautiful thing about a virtual CIO is they're usually coming in with a lot of experience of helping a company go through a change, adopt strategy. They're going to come in with some ideas, some blueprints. Right off the bat to help you achieve something so you can see the success early on and start to make choices about how you would integrate a CIO going forward.
Nicole Grimm
Yeah, what you would need. Within your organization to respond to technical demands and maybe if you need to have a internal IS team, you need to turn up or turn down external vendors you have or have not been meeting in an industry mark in. In the technology footprint that you already have. For example, let's say you. Have a really outdated legacy system, something like that and they know that there's there's more capability out there for a certain investment. These kinds of things that can help you with Rd maps and and confirm if you're on the right track or if what the technology is doing is holding you back or helping advance. The over stretched overarching strategic goals that the business is working towards. I think that kind of sums up the content we had for today. Thanks for listening. We hope you found some value in this conversation regarding the CTO versus the CIO and we hope you join us next time for more mayhem and Misfits.