Jon Williams is a social animal. As the lively and loquacious co-founder of the New York CTO Club, he has helped assemble one of the most successful professional organizations of its kind in the nation. Those same people skills helped him accomplish his goals as CTO of Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions, a provider of educational and career services.
Williams doesn't hesitate when asked about his greatest achievement at Kaplan: "the work that I did around open source." That endeavor began shortly after he joined the company in 2004, when he faced demands to reduce costs while improving the performance and functionality of customer-facing Web apps. "Our strategy was to start with some initial open source wins, then choose business-critical projects to use open source technology with."
[ Discover what insights you can take advantage of from the other 2008 InfoWorld CTO 25 winners. ]
One of Williams' biggest challenges was a culture of "build vs. buy." The 85-person tech team was accustomed to creating its own solutions in isolation, whereas open source demands collaboration and community. Williams was able to "break them out of their mold and start sharing outside of Kaplan. Open source got them to see the value in networking."
An amalgam of e-commerce, content, and courseware, Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions maintains a sprawling, high-traffic site. Williams' career at Kaplan peaked in November 2007, when he relaunched the business's core engine, Kaptest.com, using a phalanx of open source technologies, including the Alfresco content management system, the JBoss application server, and several JBoss app dev frameworks such as Seam, Hibernate, and jBPM. The result was a vast improvement in usability and a 26-fold performance increase. The project earned Jon and his team an Innovator of the Year award from JBoss.
According to Williams, however, that career high plays second fiddle to co-founding the New York CTO Club in 2000 and presiding, along with co-chairmen Igor Shindel and Mark Mathias, over its growth. The reason? "Without fail, each of the 80 members says that it has made an impact on their careers."
Just a few weeks ago, after four years as CTO at Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions, Williams became CTO of iVillage, a leading women's content site and division of NBC Universal. "My management style continues to evolve as more and more collaborative," he says. "I try now to teach as much as lead...to teach by sharing my experiences."
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