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 NEWSCTO of the year By Jennifer Jones June 15, 2001 1:01 pm PT As CTO of AOL Time Warner, Bill Raduchel has the job most technologists don't dare dream of: days spent shaping the next 'gee-whiz' consumer services that may sweep across American pop culture a decade down the road.
At any given time, Raduchel carries around his list of top 10 technology priorities. The list -- which he keeps close to his vest pocket in every sense -- is made up of ideas consistent with AOL's vow to continue transforming the consumer's online experience. This year, that list will be crucial. As proof that holding down the nation's most visible CTO post entails heady responsibilities, consider that the day America Online finally dragged its Time Warner purchase over the finish line in January 2001, critics had already declared DOA the chance for synergy across the gulfs separating the combined company's diverse businesses. A broad mandate  Despite the early implication that AOL Time Warner would be a hodgepodge of wildly different business units, Raduchel says that "most of the things I am working on apply across multiple parts of the companies."Future services that would leverage diverse company assets probably lie hidden in Raduchel's pocket on that top 10 list he won't share. But he will describe it in generalities. "These are all of the things we hope to bring to market as we focus on issues such as how television will change the Internet, what broadband will do to our business, and how we'll change the back end of our operations," Raduchel says. AOL Chairman and CEO Barry Schuler says the company relies heavily on Raduchel to sift through many soft ideas about future applications. "For me personally, Bill's role is crucial because I run the most technology-intensive business in the company," he says. "We are approached by a multitude of companies every day with the latest, greatest widget or streaming technology ... you name it," Schuler continues. He describes a role for Raduchel that is heavy on burrowing through those ideas to envision the next killer applications. Eye on the big picture Conspicuously absent from Raduchel's list are quick ideas to give the company's stock price a bounce. Others are paid handsomely to worry about that, Raduchel says. His list also isn't bogged down with day-to-day management crises that crop up, nor are there full-blown strategies for helping the geographically separated and culturally diverse staff cohere. Raduchel presides over a technical staff of thousands, but he rides herd over but a few. Instead his job is to offer a bird's-eye view, which entails gargantuan challenges: "The real challenge for a CTO is synthesis. A CTO really needs the ability to walk across large parts of the company and direct core technology investments. In my job now, the scope for synthesis is larger and the opportunity is larger," Raduchel says. On a practical level, the challenges in pursuing those opportunities can indeed be as colossal as AOL Time Warner's combined breadth and even the company's collective worth, which hit $350 billion at the landmark merger announcement date in January 2000. Technology is key AOL's Schuler says top executives at the combined company realize technology is the thread that must tie together different parts of the organization. "Our future revenues and growth are based on broadband services," Schuler says. "When you look at all of the technology that is involved in future areas such as interactive TV and IP TV, you quickly realize that a huge part of our agenda is about delivering a whole set of services at scale." Indeed, with a current AOL user base that tops 30 million, scaling these services will always be a challenge. In terms of specifics, both Schuler and Raduchel allude to the time and effort AOL's technology corps has spent trying to open up Time Warner's cable infrastructure to competing ISPs. Readying the cable infrastructure for many broadband service providers was a premerger demand from government regulators and has been a continuing technical quandary. It is also a "big opportunity" for the company, Schuler says. Managing a merger As another example of the power of the merger, Raduchel offers up a recent online music venture the company forged with international content company Bertelsmann and EMI Recorded Music. "I'm convinced this never would have happened without the merger, because it took a lot of compromises on both sides," Raduchel says. Raduchel continually refers to "synthesis" when confronted with skepticism about difficulties in blending the newly merged corporate cultures. Referring to the fabled clashes between different parts of merged companies, Raduchel says, "You hear that a lot and that certainly is the conventional wisdom, though I haven't seen it very much." AOL executives decided long before hooking up with Time Warner not to attempt to homogenize the company's culture. Instead, the company encourages variety, says Raduchel, who shrugs off the critics sounding off on AOL Time Warner's alleged lack of synergy. "Every business naturally has its own culture and cadence. The people who run HBO have a different cadence than do the people booking movie deals for 10 years at time," Raduchel says. Raduchel likes to use the word cadence, conjuring images of a corporate behemoth functioning smoothly as discrete parts all strive for rhythmic flow by leveraging a heritage each developed over the years. "Cadence drives culture, and we have a lot of different cadences in the company," Raduchel says. "By the same token, there is no strong Time Warner culture. And even in AOL, there are incredible differences between CompuServe, ICQ, and all the others in terms of culture." Raduchel and other top corporate executives at AOL Time Warner spend their time building cohesion between the units. "Technology does not lend itself to hierarchical management. It is more about ideas and people being aligned with a common vision," he says. A visionary role "My role in the company is often to act as sponsor of a new idea. I can empower those who report to me and coach people on new ideas, but to be honest, not much more than that is possible," Raduchel says. Raduchel often relies on management strategies he picked up as chief strategy officer at Sun Microsystems. "What you have to focus on is your vision and not set out to help every AOL Time Warner employee try to solve every technical issue that exists in the company," Raduchel says. Future focus Responding to the echoes of early merger cynics, Raduchel stresses that he spends most of his time on strategies designed to keep the company from charging off in too many directions at once. "We have not changed our focus since the day I walked in the door," Raduchel says. "We are very focused on transforming the consumer experience." Therein lies the likely reason AOL Time Warner was able to deliver promising first-quarter earnings "during one of the toughest operating environments in years," according to Merrill Lynch analysts in an April report. The analysts also noted that AOL Time Warner has managed to maintain moderate growth while aggressively cutting costs. The report cited positive results derived from "merger synergies" that analysts had doubted early on. Raduchel, untroubled by day-to-day stock prices, is comfortable in his forward-looking role. "I don't worry about where we will be as a company in five days," he says. "I carry around 10 initiatives that will hopefully come into some form of fruition over several years."
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