The Evolving Role of the CTO in the Age of Rapid Transformation

If technology is adaptive and ever changing to new realities, then so are the roles that oversee its position within a business. CIOs, CTOs, and other IT Decision Makers — often coined as ITDMs — have faced a year of unprecedented disruption, both within their organisations but also in the definition of their roles and the boundaries in which they operate.

Some of the aforementioned positions were somewhat fluid, dependent on the structure of their organisations in question, however with a new era of accelerated transformation upon us with the ‘post’ pandemic landscape ever present this fluidity is already increasing and doesn’t look set to solidify any time soon.

The evolving role of the CTO: How Covid is driving change

At this point, hundreds of thousands of words have been written about the pandemic’s effect on business, on transformation, on empowering new models and new entrants, and of course its effect on how we work. Only 67% of CTOs report directly to the CEO, according to research by Korn Ferry — though as the IT function increases in its perceived value in the drive for resilience and competitiveness, the CTOs perceived value to the organisation looks likely to increase also.

Many reports indicate that maintaining and operating legacy applications consumes anywhere between 60 and 80% of corporate IT budgets — so CTOs who facilitate a shift to best-in-class infrastructure can eradicate these maintenance costs, whilst delivering the level of robustness, resilience, performance, and scalability they need to be able to grow, innovate, and excel as we head into 2020 and beyond. Below we explore in more detail the evolving role of the CTO, the challenges they face, and the changing nature of CTO responsibilities.

A safe pair of hands

Since employees are now working from home, this raises questions about the resilience of the company’s cybersecurity — even for CTOs with CISOs present in the organisation. Many employees are using unsecured personal devices to access enterprise networks and this could potentially open organisations up to security gaps and losses in data visibility.

The onset and resultant effects of the virus pandemic has accelerated the pace of digitalisation and has further strengthened the need for the CTOs to not only manage their company’s technology capability and strength — but also to take a pragmatic approach to understand the nature and flow of data and implement innovative solutions to manage the integrity and security of data, without disrupting core business operations.

The new nature of work also presents an immediate need to pivot elastically from traditional desktop-based solutions to cloud-based ‘desktop-as-a-service’ options that can be accessed from anywhere. According to Information Age, virtualisation tools and cloud services like AWS and Azure are at the forefront of CTO’s minds now in a way that perhaps they weren’t prior to Covid-19.

The CTO as a driver of value

The disruptions caused by the pandemic have highlighted the crucial role of technology, and by extension the importance of varied CTO responsibilities and the general evolving role of the CTO — from supporting home working to diversifying new offerings and then being able to handle an uptick in new customers. According to research by McKinsey, of the organisations that have pursued digitisation as a means to remain competitive, nearly three quarters were still in the early stages of their transformation in the summer of this year. They also highlight a point that’s been made before but can no longer be ignored: technology as a key driver of value, not simply support.

Read the full article at: https://thescalers.com/the-evolving-role-of-the-cto/