Chapter 14: Bridging Business and Technology: Keeping Things as Simple as Possible

Mike Ragunas

The Role of the CTO

My role as CTO at StaplesDirect.com is to focus on developing and delivering e-commerce technologies in support of all of our different e-commerce ventures, including Staples.com, StaplesLink.com, Quill.com and BusinessDepot.com, our Canadian site. My focus is on how we deliver customer-facing and support technologies, and how to deliver them in a way that is best aligned with our business objectives.

I see myself as a bridge between our technology delivery capabilities and our business strategy. It is important to really understand both sides of that equation so that I can make sure we are delivering the technology that best matches our strategy. We add value to the business not just by building solutions, but by also bringing forward technologies and ideas that we think should be considered as part of the business strategy. I also partner across the business to help identify things that we can do to serve customers better.

I measure our IT organization on how much value we deliver to the business. We are here to help the business drive the top line and the bottom line - sales and profitability. For the last three and a half years since its inception, my team and I have been 100% focused on developing our Internet channel. Our success has been clear - we have built our e-commerce business from effectively zero in 1998 to what will be approaching a billion dollars in revenue in FY2001. The business has also begun to turn a profit for us, so we have achieved that rare feat in Internet business, to grow rapidly and deliver profitability at the same time.