What makes a great CTO, and how do you know when your organisation needs one?

The CTO role can mean many different things depending on the type of organisation you are, the industry you’re in, and the skills already in the business. says Mark Ridley, co-founder of business technology outsourcing firm SeeTo

With organisations more reliant than ever on technology, in part due to the disruption caused by the Coronavirus pandemic, it's of utmost importance for companies to ensure they have the right IT leadership in place.

The CTO role is often misunderstood, so Computing caught up with Mark Ridley, co-founder of business technology outsourcing firm SeeTo, to find out what makes a great CTO, and how to identify what type of CTO your organisation needs.

Computing: What does a great CTO do, how do they improve a business?

Mark Ridley: It depends on the business. I don't think there's any way to categorise the traits of a great CTO without the context of the business. It depends how much the business relies on technology, and whether that technology is bespoke for that business or simply an enabler, both are important. In the case of the business where technology is an enabler, the role of the CTO is to understand what the business requires of the technology and then to work with different business units to ensure they're using technology appropriately and cost effectively.

It's important for a CTO to not be a technologist first. A great CTO will understand why something is important then whether technology is the appropriate solution, and try to avoid the use of technology if possible because it's always costly. Can business goals be achieved with a process? First and foremost a great CTO is a great business person who can understand the drivers of the business and whether technology can be enabler.

In a business with unique technology that needs to be built, a really critical part of that role is understanding how to structure the organisation in a way that will allow the creation of that value. Are you a technology business or one powered by technology? If it's the former you need to understand how the flow of value through business is driven by the technology component. It's the job of any business to identify customers, to get customers to buy your products and deliver value through them. The CTO needs to understand where technology fits in the value chain of the company.

CTG: When do you need a CTO?

MR: I find it's mostly smaller businesses who need CTOs. There's probably already CIO in a larger business and the terms can be used interchangeably. In a smaller business that's very technology driven, where they believe they need to build their own technology with their own development team, one of the most common dysfunctions is that the head of engineering has been promoted to the role of CTO, but they're not a CTO. They may be very good at architecting cloud software, building applications, running development teams, and that's probably what they love doing, but a lot of the time they don't have experience of the other aspects of being a CTO.

Then it's obvious what they lack and that describes what the CTO role is in that company. So you have a head of engineering, who perhaps can build software, but look at what they're not doing, what's getting left behind? Typically that's business technology, which is traditional IT - ensuring new users are on-boarded securely, that email is secure and IT security is considered all the way through the organisation at a user level not just at application levels. Also things like compliance, GDPR, ISO270001 and thinking of the overall responsibility of the organisation.

The other thing they could be responsible for is budgets, forecasts, investor meetings, outreach, PR - a whole swathe of things that a head of engineering often is not doing or doesn't want to that's within role of the CTO, especially within a midsize business who often won't have a CIO. Scale ups often hire someone who can do the development but are left doing compliance and the rest poorly. They might hire someone who doesn't want to go to an investor meeting, doesn't have the right support, coaching or even the predilection to move up to the CTO role.

I found with SMEs hiring, I will challenge them whether they should be calling role 'CTO'. If they hire primarily a software engineer, they need to understand that the move to CTO is a career change, it's not just being a technical co founder.

CTG: Do you need a CTO if you already have an effective IT function?

MR: My main job is often working with a board, especially the CIO and other members of the C-Suite, and understanding what's going well and otherwise within the technology function. Sometimes that's working for investors, often it will be a CEO asking to have a look at the business. Almost always I tend to find the software engineering part, the part the CEO thinks is a problem as it's not fast enough, is actually ok. The cloud infrastructure, security, application development lifecycle, all of that is normally ok if there's a good head of development.

But I very commonly find the business technology element is poorly served. That's things which don't feel like they're really technology. Like how do I implement identity management, how do I set up an intranet or a CRM, how do I ensure I have the right HR system and onboarding process? That's all part of the CTO's responsibility but it's unlikely to be done well in smaller businesses. There's a great deal of business process engineering that can be put into those areas.

Also I find that generally the reason the CEO believes that the software development teams are not going as fast as they'd like is because those teams are struggling to implement the strategy as the business doesn't have one, or they do but it's poorly communicated to development teams. It's rarely actually a problem with the processes being followed by technology teams, more that there's no strategy, no clear annual or quarterly goals, so there's consequently lots of context switching going on. Teams are generally bad at prioritisation, and the CTO's job is to understand the business value and communicate it to the technology organisation.

Computing's IT Leaders Festival 2021 will be held over the 5th, 12th and 19th October 2021. Register to attend now!