CIO or CTO: What's the Difference?
from March/April 2007
“Chief information officer” and “chief technology officer” are sometimes used interchangeably, but technology cognoscenti draw important differences between them. A CIO is responsible for the computer systems a company uses internally to gather, aggregate, analyze, and disseminate data, and for the systems’ security and integrity. The role of a CTO, as it is most commonly defined, reaches outside the company into the ways technology affects customers, suppliers, investors, and others. CTOs are typically found at outfits where technology is the business—hardware and software makers, for example—or where technology has become critical to the way the organizations interact with their customers, as at financial-services companies. In the latter category, titles vary. Some are loftier (MasterCard calls W. Roy Dunbar president, global technology and operations) and some humbler (at JPMorgan Chase, John Schmidlin is head of technology).At some companies, the CTO is the technologist who implements the IT strategy laid out by the CIO. William Raduchel, 60, who was CTO of Time Warner and CIO of Sun Microsystems, says many companies would be well served by such a model: visionary information manager as CIO and hands-on technologist as CTO. Now a director of four high-tech companies—Blackboard Inc., Chordiant Software, Opera Software, and Silicon Image—Raduchel says the pairing can provide companies with important checks and balances. “You need to have somebody looking at your investments with a detached eye,” he says. “If I’m in the middle of building a house and have been slaving away on it for three years, I’m not likely to tell you it’s the wrong design. The company may need somebody there who doesn’t have a bias.”
