| Arts & Humanities (850+) | Business & Economy (700+) | Technology (50+) | Entertainment (100+) | Health (300+) | Kids & Teens (300+) | Regional (600+) | Society & Culture (2000+) | General Knowledge (70+) |
 |
|
Clarifying CIO and CTO Roles |
|
| Comment On the Article | Submit An Article | Download PDF Version |
|
Chief Information Officer (CIO)
Understands the business information needs of the company, customers, suppliers, management (at all levels), government, and stockholders collectively called stakeholders. The CIO also maintains relationship with media and public and directs the architecture of company information domains and business processes (sales, operations, supply chain, financial, human resources, etc.). CIO usually deals with information needs and business processes, but not information technology architectures, per se. The CIO works with the CEO/President on business models and vision issues, and collaborates with business VPs to learn their needs and develop new concepts, also works with the CTO to design appropriate systems. The CIO is a business person with IT experience.
Chief Technology Officer (CTO)
Understands current technology alternatives and capabilities, including strengths/weaknesses and tradeoffs of various choices in the hierarchy of applications, databases, transactional systems, operating systems, networking, hardware, platforms and other technologies. The CTO works with CIO to understand the business needs, and plans for technology evolution of the company systems. The CTO is a technology person having some familiarity with the company business model.
The CTO position emerged in the United States in the 1980s as a business-focused extension of the position of Director of R&D. Large research-oriented companies like General Electric, AT&T, and Alcoa created this position to increase the profits yielded from research projects in their laboratories. With the evolution of eBusiness and eCommerce and the concerns on IT risk management has made the CTO position gain prominence.
Summarizing Business and Information architecture should be a CIO's forte, Application and Technology Architecture is the CTO forte. The model is commonly known as "BAIT" (Business, Application, Information and Technology).