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December 18, 2002
Conflicts of Interest
After I wrote my last post, I thought I'd better write a general statement on conflicts of interest. When I was working for Utah (still am for a week or so) my interests were clearly defined. As that changes, people may wonder about what personal stake I have in things I talk about here. I do not want this site to become a series of advertisements or for people to have to question things I say. So, my general policy is that I will disclose a conflict if it exists and say nothing if it does not. So, you may assume, for example, that I have no personal stake in Vultus (see the previous post).
BTW, if you're wondering why I just spewed forth with three posts in a row, its because I'm giving a final and I'm standing here with nothing to do. :-)
07:13 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Vultus
I spent 90 minutes this morning with a company in Utah County (Lindon, actually) called Vultus. I was pretty impressed. If they'd shown me that product three years ago when I was building consumer oriented eCommerce tools, I'd have written them a check on the spot. Its that cool. Here's what it does:
Vultus has created a Javascript library and professional IDE that allows you to create a think client experience without any client footprint. Since the Javascript runs in the browser (IEv5 or later, Netscape v7 or later, or Mozilla) lots of interesting things can be done that just aren't possible on a server. No plug-in is required. The library is around 300K and is cachable, so its fairly low overhead. The IDE creates professional looking GUIs with a drag and drop interface.
One of the cool things they can do it interface to SOAP services. They have a tool which automatically creates a GUI that runs in the browser from the WSDL.
They've put together a demo site that shows some of the capabilities. Be sure to look at the source.
07:08 PM | Recommend This | Print This
CIO vs. CTO
One of the questions I hear with some frequency is "what's the difference between a CIO and a CTO?" Having been both, I think I have some insights that might be helpful.
First let me talk about what I think they have in common:
- In both jobs, a key role is helping technologists understand what the business needs and helping the business understand what the technology can do for them.
- Both roles require a strong technologist with a strong grasp of business (kind of a corollary to the last point, but slightly different).
- Both should be strategic thinkers.
- Both should be excellent leaders.
Now for their differences:
- I see a CTO as primarily focused on the top line while the CIO is primarily focused on the bottom line. There's some cross over, but I think this is a valid distinction.
- A CTO is primarily concerned with external products and customers while a CIO is primarily concerned with running the business (internal products and customers).
- In an ideal world, the CTO runs the product development organization while the CIO runs the IT organization.
- If you have to choose, being a strong technologist is more important for the CTO, while being a good manager is more important for the CIO.
- A CIO has to be operational and understand how to build repeatable processes, reliable systems, and the organization to run them. A CTO doesn't necessarily have to have these skill if backed up by a strong operational person in the role of CIO.
A large technology oriented company (more than a few hundred employees) should have both. There's too much to do for one person and the thinking can be very different. One of the big problems at Excite\@Home was they never had someone at the "C" level who was looking internally. "IT" was a division (not even a VP slot) inside the larger technology organization. There were four levesl between this director and the CEO. The result was real chaos in the internal systems and operations areas. The CTO was a brilliant technologist, but not very "operational" and consequently, repeatable processes were hard to find.
Personally I've enjoyed both roles, but I found the challenges to be very different.