I often find it beneficial when I am trying to learn a new concept to have a real world example so that I might relate the ideas being discussed to my own experiences. This is why physics as a discipline didn’t excite me much. It’s often about drawing lines on paper, applying formulas supplied, then drawing other lines to illustrate force + speed + weight to show outcome. That’s a wonderful area of study for some, but for me I need more concrete examples to relate to.
With that said lately I have been thinking about the role of a CTO within an organization and how this role relates to the architects who operate within. In doing so I came up with this imagined example which as it turns out isn’t as much imagined as I had originally thought.
In this business scenario I am going to talk about 3 separate companies all with relatively similar goals. With each company I am going to illustrate what the CTO of that organization should be thinking about day to day. I am then going to walk through an example at a high level, and discuss the process from initial idea through a working implementation. Keep in mind though this example is very high level. Actual implementation in some cases takes years to work out. Also while I am aware of similarities to actual, in no way did any of these companies actually contribute to this post. All of this is fictional, but could be interpreted to reflect real life situations.
COMPANY 1
Background:
When deciding which gadget to buy , I will typically read a few websites which review the gadgets by combining expert reviews as well as user reviews. Sometimes these reviews are people pimping their products, and other times they are just individuals railing about a particular company and trying to disparage them. Ultimately after reading both the expert and the general population reviews you can gather some general knowledge of what to look for in regarding the product you’re in the process of buying, or make a decision between similar products.
The most popular websites make their money through advertisements, whose rates directly relate to the amount of eyeballs that visit their site. The sites are relatively simple with no actual transactions taking place.
After some internal research, this company noticed a trend over the last few months that the visitor volume is diminishing.
If you ask the CTO of this company what he is thinking about day to day what do you think his primary response would be?
CTO: “How can we utilize technology to improve our visitor count, so that we can maintain or even increase our current income levels?”
COMPANY 2
Background:
There is a website I purchase most of my electronics from. It’s wildly known to have the best prices on a range of items, and in fact I have personally saved $400 on one HDTV purchase over the local chain electronics store.
This company makes it’s money on volume. The more electronics they sell, the more money they make. Their stated purpose is to drive more and more consumers to their site, while maintaining current customer satisfaction.
While reviewing the site log, the company has also discovered that customers often leave the site to go check on reviews, and in many cases, those same customers never come back
If you ask the CTO of this company what he is thinking about day to day what do you think his primary response would be?
CTO: “How can we use technology to retain customers, and increase usage of our website by consumers intent on buying electronics? ”
COMPANY 3
Background:
There are many general retailers on the net who sell all kinds of products, but most started as a one trick pony hocking a particular grouping of items, became good at that, then expanded. A particular website I continue to use to purchase books has stated that it wants to become the one stop shop for everything a consumer would purchase. Think of the WalMart of the internet with a better user experience and better products.
If you happen to be having a conversation with the CTO of this organization what do you think he will be thinking about?
CTO: “How can we use technology to gain customers and provide that one stop shopping experience for everything a consumer would want?”
Moving Forward
Gaining customers, and retaining customers is the most important aspect of a business. This is not earth shattering, nor is it ground breaking. It’s just simple common sense.
So lets see how each one of these companies go about doing that.
COMPANY 1
The CTO of this company acts as both an outside forward thinking technologist and an inside EA. So placing the EA hat securely on his head, the CTO researches how existing assets can be leveraged as an offering to companies who want to add review functionality to their sites without building the technology themselves.
The CTO/EA interviews the Solution Architect who heads up the website development team and discovers that the website is built on Spring with a Hibernate data persistence layer. The Solution Architect mentions that it is possible to extend the architecture using SOA principals, and offers to work with his development team to put together a relatively simple demo to illustrate how this can be done.
After reviewing the demo, the Solution Architect is instructed to lead an effort to build a SOA layer on top of the existing website. Other Solution Architects from the Accounting and Advertising silo’s are employed to build integrations into their existing systems to track sales and consumption of their published services.
The CTO then announces to the corporation’s leadership team that there is now away for consumer sites to use their review technology asset.
Sales can then introduce this functionality to Company 2 as a service they can add to their site.
COMPANY 2
The CTO speaking with his CEO discovers that they are in negotiations with a rather large online retailer who wants to get into the electronics business without having to actually build the business from the ground floor, or actually buying an online retailer.
Their CTO decides to undertake a program to build a SOA based architecture around their existing infrastructure including their website. One Enterprise Architect is assigned to write a Governance plan. Another EA is tasked with documenting the current Enterprise Level Architecture with a specific focus on SOA. While another EA is tasked with developing a detailed plan for building on these existing services and creating new services offerings to meet the business need. The later two will employ solutions architects who work within the given organizations silos implementing specific business critical solutions.
Lastly an Enterprise Architect is employed to research the reasons why customer’s leave their site, and come up with a plan to retain them.
After being contacted by Company 1, Company 2 decides to expand their site by consuming the Web Services provided by Company 1. Part of this agreement, stipulates that the advertisements sold on Company 1’s site must also be displayed when consuming the difference services.
Each and every product sold on Company 2’s website, will have attached to it a set of reviews from Company 1’s site. This will keep customers from leaving Company 2’s site, and each request to company 1’s site to provide those reviews is registered in their tracking system for future Advertising rate calculations.
COMPANY 3
As a well known book retailer that wants to get into the business of selling electronics, the CTO from this company researches the best companies who offer the right set of technologies to allow for the expansion of their site into the electronics world. To do this, the CTO meets with the CTO of Company 2 to discuss how their technology could be integrated into Company 3’s offerings. CTO2 explains how they have built a SOA architecture with all of the services needed to both present the catalog, and purchase the items. But not only that, CTO2 explains that part of their services offering is to provide review services for all of their products, as well as the ability to add reviews to CTO3’s existing catalog.
CTO3 then instructs his EA’s to draw up a plan to add this functionality to their site.
SUMMARY
In most organizations the CTO’s responsibility is to use technology to improve business. They are the forward thinkers within the organization always working to further the agenda of the company by leading technological efforts; to improve organizational efficiency, drive up revenue, foster partner relationships, and in some cases lead efforts to build or improve revenue generating products. In this scenario, we talked about three distinct companies all looking to increase customer traffic and revenue. In each case the CTO was tasked with finding a way to technologically provide the means to do so.
But a CTO would be useless without an EA. An EA looks inward, while a CTO looks outward. Meaning that it’s the EA’s responsibility to lead the efforts across the enterprise to govern and build the systems needed for running the given business. To put it succinctly the EA bridges the gap between CTO ideas, business problems, and technical implementation.
