Contrast With Chief Information Officer (CIO)
The focus of a CTO may be contrasted with that of a CIO. A CIO is likely to solve organizational problems through acquiring and adapting existing technologies (especially those of an IT nature), whereas a CTO principally oversees development of new technologies (of various types). Many large companies have both positions.
Another major distinction is between technologies that a firm seeks to actually develop to commercialize itself vs. technologies that support or enable a firm to carry out its ongoing operations. A CTO is focused on technology integral to products being sold to customers or clients, while a CIO is a more internally oriented position focused on technology needed for running the company (and in IT fields, for maintaining foundational software platforms for any new applications). Accordingly, a CTO is more likely to be integrally involved with formulating intellectual property (IP) strategies and exploiting proprietary technologies.
In an enterprise whose primary technology concerns are addressable by ready-made technologies (which, by definition, is not the case for any companies whose very purpose is to develop new technologies), a CIO might be the primary officer overseeing technology issues at the executive level. In an enterprise whose primary technology concerns do involve developing (or marketing) new technologies, a CTO is more likely to be the primary representative of these concerns at the executive level.
Read more about this topic: Chief Technology Officer
Famous quotes containing the words contrast, chief, information and/or officer:
“In contrast with envy, which usually occurs between two people and is focused upon another person’s qualities or possessions, jealousy occurs when a third person becomes a threat to a dyad. Jealousy involves the loss or the impending loss of a relationship that one wants to hold onto, a relationship that is vital to personal fulfillment and claimed as one’s own.”
—Carol S. Becker (b. 1942)
“But chief to heedless flies the window proves
A constant death; where gloomily retired,
The villain spider lives, cunning and fierce,
Mixture abhorred! Amid a mangled heap
Of carcases in eager watch he sits,
O’erlooking all his waving snares around.”
—James Thomson (1700–1748)
“Computers are good at swift, accurate computation and at storing great masses of information. The brain, on the other hand, is not as efficient a number cruncher and its memory is often highly fallible; a basic inexactness is built into its design. The brain’s strong point is its flexibility. It is unsurpassed at making shrewd guesses and at grasping the total meaning of information presented to it.”
—Jeremy Campbell (b. 1931)
“When Prince William [later King William IV] was at Cork in 1787, an old officer ... dined with him, and happened to say he had been forty years in the service. The Prince with a sneer asked what he had learnt in those forty years. The old gentleman justly offended, said, “Sir, I have learnt, when I am no longer fit to fight, to make as good a retreat as I can” —and walked out of the room.”
—Horace Walpole (1717–1797)