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CTO Connection
Chad Dickerson
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Prioritize, prioritize
ONE OF THE toughest aspects of a CTO's job is time management. In addition to the usual meetings, conferences with employees, and bureaucratic paperwork, CTOs must spend a lot of time reading up on the latest technology trends to inform the decisions they make every day. During this time of year, family and social obligations increase as the holidays draw near, and business responsibilities mount as we all try to clear the decks for an enjoyable holiday. Inevitably, conflicts arise and quick decisions must be made about how to spend your precious time. I follow these rules in making my decisions:
* Customers trump everything. During a typical week at InfoWorld, someone will make at least one last-minute request for me to give a potential or existing advertising customer a tour of the InfoWorld Test Center (for more information about the Test Center, see www.infoworld.com/tc/t_about.html). No matter what I have planned that day, I always make time for our customers. Everybody in a company needs to constantly remind themselves where the revenue is coming from. In my visits to companies with products and services I am considering, the CTO is often involved in the early sales meetings, so others out there practice this same rule: The success of a CTO and his or her company largely rests on contact with customers.
* Make time to reinvigorate the technology vision. No matter how clear the vision at the beginning of a technology project, it can get off track without regular attention. Sometimes the technology application diverges from the business problem at hand and needs to be realigned, and sometimes the business problem you were solving at the beginning of the project has changed or morphed into something else. Straddling the worlds of business and technology, the CTO is uniquely qualified to step into these situations, whip out the dry-erase markers, and clear misunderstandings to get projects back on track.
* Focus on solving recurrent problems once. In every organization, a critical server needs to be rebooted on occasion and no one knows exactly why. Similarly, at least one key process requires a series of manual machinations and incantations before it can be revived after crashing. Often, the fixes for these kinds of problems remain inside the heads of your systems or engineering staff, and once resolved, staffers go about their business and the fix remains undocumented. These kinds of known, repeated, and frustrating problems can drain the life out of an otherwise vital technology organization. Because these types of recurring problems are often a combination of staffing issues, budget issues (such as needing additional hardware or software), and technology architecture issues, it is the duty and obligation of the CTO to step in and help solve the problem once and for all (and make sure it is fully documented!). Although solving specific technical problems might seem like a minor detail to a high-level CTO, doing so keeps your team focused on new problems and your business running smoothly -- a true time-saver.
* Staffing issues take priority. Whether praising the work of an employee who has completed a project ahead of schedule, making a key hire, or dealing with a problem employee, CTOs need to deal with staffing issues as soon as they arise. In a superficial sense, technology seems like a bunch of back-office machines running your business, but in reality, the people behind them make or break your operation. Doing your best to keep your employees happy and productive is a good investment of your time.
Follow these rules and your holiday scheduling woes will be a bit more manageable, and you'll set yourself up for a productive new year.
Write to Chad Dickerson, InfoWorld's CTO, at chad_dickerson@infoworld.com.
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