Applying The 'CTO-For-a-Day' Approach.

Recent technology advancements are causing almost every organization to re-assess and refine its vision of itself. Company CEOs fear being like the railroads that failed to realize they were in the transportation business not the rail business. At the time, the railroad companies failed to acknowledge the changing technology. Thus they failed to adapt to new ways business would be done.

Today, the equivalent changes are the emergence of omnipresent, global networks that have reduced the friction on the flow of information. Companies are now coming to the realization that knowledge of and access to intellectual assets of an organization represent the dominant value for most enterprises rather than capital assets 

These two factors signal incredible opportunities for changing business models. There are few businesses that will not be impacted in significant ways by these opportunities. Businesses will either transform themselves to adapt or will find their business eroded as new, more efficient models emerge. Ultimately, virtually every business will conduct a significant portion of its operations through technology and particularly technology that supports business operations and transactions.

The barrier and the possibilities

While this is a time of great opportunity, it is also a time of great trepidation. Having worked with a wide variety of companies from Fortune 50 to very small or start-up organizations, we've observed a variety of interesting barriers. The two most common are lack of knowledge of the medium and its technology, and limited view of its potential value.

Lets start with the second barrier first. When most people think of the Internet, they naturally begin to think about Amazon or Yahoo. Basically, they think about using the Internet to reach the consumer in new ways -- as a new sales or information channel.

Unfortunately, this often blinds us to many other possible uses of the Internet. The real value for most of our clients is using the Internet as a way to access disparate information and data sources, pull those into a codified model and then support process and workflow from that data. This is often focused on employees and partners as well as customers. But it is often real business systems as opposed to e-commerce or consumer information sites.

The key is looking at potential audiences and potential information sources and considering how the Internet could be used as a vehicle for supporting the value chain for the organization. From this emerges an interesting picture of the possibilities.

However, this is often where the first barrier mentioned above kicks in. Any project involving technology goes through this challenging process of considering many different ways to use the technology to address particular needs. Each possible use is considered in terms of how well it solves the problem, how easily it can be extended, how much it will cost, what the risks are, etc. Because there are so many possible uses of technology, there can be many, many choices that need to be examined from a myriad of facets. In some ways this is daunting, but, to me, it is the most compelling and interesting part of the entire process.

It's all about the message

As the challenge to stay competitive heats up, the responsibility for the company's success is being disseminated to its employees. Now more than ever, employees are becoming directly responsible for the organization's bottom-line as well as its growth. To support this new paradigm, businesses need to empower their workers with information that is timely, actionable and tailored to their needs and how they use it.

As the data warehousing industry has shown us, most of the information we need to be productive exists in one form or another within the corporate system. However, getting to this data has been not only technically challenging but in some cases political. Not many organizations can afford monolithic ERP systems or complex and over-priced CRM solutions. As a small business owner (or large for that matter) cost and value to the organization is paramount in making any IT purchase decision.

By leveraging the Internet as a vehicle for information exchange and workflow, organizations can quickly and efficiently bring much needed information to employees that can act upon it. This is made possible through advancements in web technologies and architectures that enable message delivery solutions and process integration. Additionally, the convergence of messaging protocols allow this information to be delivered to virtually any platform be it to the desktop, mobile laptop, PDA, cell phone, etc.

Adapting these new technologies into an organization is a process. It is a process of demonstrating to all owners the value-chain the value of how on-time actionable information leads to greater gains in productivity and in return revenue.

The challenge

The challenge for many organizations, however, is that they have no easy way to go through this process. What is required is an interesting blend of technology and business skills to try to find the best possible answer given a set of technical constraints. It is knowing the business processes, the information necessary to complete employee tasks and having insight into the psychology behind what motivates individuals to act. This is exactly why companies hire CTOs. However, what does a company do that doesn't have someone with a capability to do this?

CTO for a day

The answer we've found for companies is louse outside resources in a limited capacity to help them determine what is feasible given their needs. We refer to this kind of approach as using a CTO-for-a-day'. Often this allows clients to quickly lay out a high level plan and to establish realistic expectations.

The key to success is starting from the company's goals and then quickly examining a wide variety of choices for reaching and working with customers, employees, partners and investors using the Internet. Each of these should be given quick reality checks and then compared to goals and objectives.

Through this process, most often a lot of previously hidden possibilities emerge and some of the more obvious approaches are given quick reality tests. At the end of a high impact day, companies can emerge with a general strategy for the Internet that simply is not possible without a combination of the team that understands the business and an understanding of the Internet. Our success using this process suggests that this is something that more organizations should consider, and it also suggests that more organizations should be providing this service.

Dr. Anthony Karrer is CEO/CTO of TechEmpower, Inc., of El Segundo, CA.