Chapter 3: CTO Priorities

Defined by Media, Analysts and Corporations

This section brings us major issues and priorities surrounding the CTO profession. Those issues take account of some major implications of long-term and short-term spending patterns and recognition of new priorities for a CTO. Priorities are important for us to make certain decisions and define who we really are. I have assembled priorities that are outlined by major media publications, analysts, and corporation.

Business Week's Technology Overview

Business Week (46) indicates that:

The underlying technologies not only aren't slowing down, they're accelerating. Computer-chip performance keeps doubling every 18 months, and disk-drive capacity and Internet-connection speeds are improving even faster. That's spurring new products, from MP3 and DVD players to Web services for corporations, that are disrupting industries from entertainment to health care. Indeed, the titans of business today, from Dell to Wal-Mart Stores, as well as upstarts such as Amazon.com and JetBlue Airways, owe much of their leadership to using information technology in special ways. Each employs some of the same technologies, whether that's Linux software or servers based on Intel chips. But it's their expertise in deploying and customizing those technologies year after year that gives them a continued. From steadying orders and better-than-expected profits to the rise of promising technologies such as the wireless Internet, Linux software, and digital entertainment, tech's long winter is thawing. To take advantage of these new opportunities, however, technology companies must reinvent themselves -- fast. Instead of applying the advances of silicon, storage, and network economics to hiking performance on existing products for the same old customers, they must turn those forces to making products, existing and new, that are cheaper. (46)