Being a CTO is more than just a title, it’s about creating value under constant pressure.
Both internally and externally, you need to be able to cope with unforeseen events that are becoming more and more frequent and with increasing impacts on organizations that need to continuously improve to remain competitive.
The day-to-day life of a CTO is far from smooth sailing. Between production incidents, resignations, project deadlines, regulatory deadlines and management expectations, a CTO has to know how to organize himself to deliver.
This article identifies the 4 continuous stress factors facing CTOs and shares the contributions of a systems approach to staying relevant.
Guaranteeing day-to-day operations
Good IT operations are at the root of a CTO’s value creation—they enable the organization to focus on higher value-added tasks with the minimum of interruptions and distractions.
A daily routine in which everyone feels busy, confusing occupation with productivity, ends up consuming the organization’s resources putting out fires instead of proactively preventing them and dealing with other issues.
A CTO must guarantee operations at 3 main levels:
- The team, guaranteeing stability and motivation
- Services through standard change & support
- Security to protect business and assets.
In a context where profiles are scarce and offers numerous, the first challenge for a CTO is to keep the team motivated and united to achieve the organization’s objectives within the constraints often inherited (among others, HR scale grids).
Problems at team level will first impact IT services, with an increase in response time, a reduction in process quality, and cascading impacts like a loss of knowledge that will also impact security.
Although it is possible to use Managed Services for certain areas of expertise, these are still limited in terms of cost and applicability, and do not eliminate the cumulated costs of staff turnover.
Creating value under constraints
Management expects a CTO to create business value through technology, yet with more or less formally expressed constraints (costs, deadlines, quality) and expectations (gains, impact, image, etc.) within the system.
A CTO therefore needs to clarify his framework of execution by identifying his playing field, the various actors and the forces at play. This clarity will enable efforts to be focused on initiatives with greater impact, thanks to leverage effects.
In such context, a CTO’s value creation depends on working through:
- Constraints of cost, time and quality
- Expectations of multiple stakeholders
- Boundaries of responsibilities and actions.
Although the quality triangle formalizes the need to balance effort against objectives, many CTOs need to maximize these constraints by combining incremental, agile and value-driven approaches to respond to board expectations.
The increasingly diverse stakeholders interested in the value of technology also need to be managed: from CEO, CFO, COO to customer support, safety, audit and environmental managers (we’ll come to these later).
To be sustainable, this creation of value must also take place within the boundaries of the system’s execution, and intrinsic system knowledge must be developed through transformations in order to better predict and extend the CTO impact.
Balancing opposing forces
A CTO must also navigate an ocean of strong counter-currents: innovate quickly while minimizing waste, reduce technical debt with limited resources, or accelerate without sacrificing quality.
The stress factor materializes precisely between (i) the gap between expected results and the means available to achieve them, and (ii) reinforced opposing forces (e.g. innovation consumes resources, increases waste and technical debt).
A CTO must therefore know how to manage:
- Delivering value quickly and efficiently
- Innovating faster yet containing waste and debt
- Reduce technical debt with lower cost while innovating.
As the balance seems difficult to strike, a CTO should focus his efforts on initiatives that combine the achievement of different objectives (e.g., incremental innovation while eliminating legacy) requiring a strong understanding of the overall landscape.
Actions must then be balanced within a transformation portfolio to best balance these opposing forces by allocating resources to business projects, continuous improvement and proactive internal initiatives.
A CTO who recognizes the need to invest in his or her software production system will also be much better equipped to deliver business value more quickly and efficiently.
Preparing for structural change
Being prepared for the future seems difficult for a CTO whose day-to-day life is overwhelmed by priorities and demands. But it’s a necessity for organizations that have to cope with greater regulation, sustainability and productivity.
Past issues may seem remote, but current ones are very much present: real-time communication of accounting movements, environmental and social reporting (ESG), cybersecurity regulation (NIS2), artificial intelligence (AI).
The major changes facing CTOs are :
- Regulation increasingly present and difficult to anticipate
- Environment in a broad sense, including society and governance
- Artificial intelligence is impacting working methods and technology.
A good overview of the sector and the forces at play helps CTOs to better understand the possible evolution of these inflection points, so as to best prepare technology ecosystems to adapt to them.
These standards, often accompanied by heavy penalties, use up resources ideally allocated to other, equally important priorities for the company, reinforcing the inherent stress factors to be borne as a CTO.
Fortunately, some of these constraints are healthy for the ecosystem, forcing players to play on equal terms, with greater transparency, and creating productivity opportunities for those who know how to capture them.
Becoming a CTO with a systems approach
A CTO must know how to create value under the constant tension of the stress factors covered in this article: day-to-day operations, value creation, opposing forces and structural changes.
From operations to innovation, CTOs can’t rely solely on the fragility of their own person or a few people in their inner circle, showing their limits in a constantly changing ecosystem where autonomy and empowerment are needed.
The software production system proves to be the investment that enables a CTO to develop a robust ecosystem of players and forces, which can then become resilient until it reaches the maximum level of antifragility.
At a low level of maturity, those who have abandoned investment in their production systems remain busy with day-to-day interruptions. Others are developing their companies’ capacity to adapt and innovate.
Become this systemic CTO.
References
2023. The State of Organizations. McKinsey & Company.
Jennifer Cohen. 2018. Busy Vs. Productive: Which One Are You? Forbes.
How High Employee Turnover Poses Increased Cyber Security Risk. Cooperbandtech.
Understanding the Pareto Principle (The 80/20 Rule). Better Explained.
Project management triangle. Wikipedia.
Antoine Craske. 2022. Minimum Valuable Move: How To Make Decisions With Confidence. QE Unit.
Antoine Craske. 2023. 7 Signs It’s Time for a Systemic Approach to Software Production. QE Unit.