You run a company of a few hundred people. Technology is a large part of what you spend, and a risk you cannot judge yourself. Your management table has someone for finance, sales, operations and people. For technology there is an IT manager who keeps things running and does it well. The decisions above that desk come to you, and you take them with whatever the supplier's account manager told you last week.
This is normal, and it works for a long time. It stops working when one of nine questions arrives and nobody owns it.
Which nine questions?
An experienced fractional (part-time) CTO I heard speak listed the nine kinds of work he gets hired for. Turned around, they are the questions a company without a CTO still has to answer.
Where are we going? What should our systems look like in three years, and what do we build, buy or stop? Without an owner, the roadmap is the sum of what each supplier wants to sell.
Who is on our side of the table? Who selects our suppliers, negotiates the contracts and holds them to what they promised? And which of them could we leave if we had to?
Who answers for security and compliance? Your customers ask about it, your auditor too, and sometimes a regulator. The specialists can do the work. Someone senior has to lead them, make the rules work in daily operation, and answer for the result. That is a leadership task, and the legal reading stays with the lawyers.
How good is what we have? An honest assessment of systems and operations, from someone who is not selling the replacement.
Who helps our own people grow? Your IT manager has nobody inside the company to test a decision with.
Who builds the team we will need? Which roles you need, in which order, and only then who to hire.
What do we do with the project that is failing? It is late and over budget, and the reports say it is fine.
What are we buying? Before an acquisition, your advisers can read the numbers. Someone has to read the systems behind them.
How do we make it one company afterwards? After closing, the integration plan has to work on the systems that really exist.
What happens when nobody owns the nine questions?
At first nothing dramatic happens. Decisions get taken late, or by the supplier. Costs rise a little every year. One day a customer's security questionnaire, an auditor's finding or a failed project makes the gap visible, and by then the choices are fewer and more expensive.
I have seen this from the inside. At a company I worked for, senior leadership wanted a data platform. The question went out as a direction, not as an assignment. It went to several people at once, who only found out later that they had all been asked the same thing, and nobody at the top stood behind it. It took several attempts and years before there was a platform that worked. Nobody ever added up what the abandoned attempts cost in people, in technology, and in keeping half-finished systems alive.
I led the attempt that worked. What made the difference was dull: an honest assessment first, one senior leader who agreed to stand behind it and understood what that meant, the value written down in business terms, a small team, and progress shown as we went. It did not last. When that leader left and nobody took over the support, it began to slide again. If I did it again I would put more effort into binding leadership to owning it. That depends on people and circumstances and cannot be fully secured, and it is still the part that decides the outcome.
Do you need a full-time CTO for these questions?
In my experience, most mid-sized companies do not need one. The nine questions arrive a few times a year, and each needs a few days of someone senior. What you need is that person part of the time. That can be a day a month as a sparring partner for your IT manager, a few days for an independent judgment before a large decision, or one or two days a week when the company is going through a change. You pay for the judgment when you need it, and your own people stay in charge of the daily work.
What changes if you already have a CIO or a CTO?
If you already have a CIO or a CTO, the question is different. In a large, regulated organisation the seat is taken, and there is a risk function and internal audit. What a board lacks there is a view from someone with no stake in the answer. It needs one before it approves a programme of millions, when a supervisor asks who at the table understands the technology, or when one supplier has become too large to leave. The nine questions still apply. There, they reach the board.
How do you start?
Write a name next to each of the nine questions. Where there is no name, start with one decision. Pick the technology decision in the next six months that worries you most: a platform choice, a supplier contract, a project that is slipping, an acquisition. Ask for an independent judgment on that one decision, with a fixed scope and a date.
Jacques Domenie led the IT function of a bank under central-bank supervision and led enterprise architecture in two industrial companies. He works for organisations part of the week through Delfen.
Sources & further reading
- The nine kinds of work: from a talk by an experienced fractional CTO.
- Six services with a fixed scope — Delfen