What is the difference between cto and coo

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Written by : Noa A. User assumes all risk of use, damage, or injury. You agree that we have no liability for any damages. Author Recent Posts. Noa A. Latest posts by Noa A see all. Your email address will not be published. They are the head of management for an organization. They report to the board of directors.

They make high-level decisions about policy and strategy. Steve Jobs was an example of a top CEO. To find out more about these other chief officer positions, click here. Not all companies have one. You probably realize that you're set up to fail. Look at the incentives built into the organization.

Engineers love innovation and are rewarded for their technology designs, but they aren't held accountable for cost-effective, stable operations. In pursuit of the "right" technologies, you'll be given the latest and greatest And when the engineers in the CTO group decide to try out some bleeding-edge product, you'll take the fall when it proves unreliable.

This structure is like allowing Hewlett-Packard to decide what computing platforms are used at America Online. How can we hold IT operations accountable for the performance of the infrastructure when they have no say over what that infrastructure looks like!? The answer is, we can't. Authority must match accountability, in every part of the organization, all the time.

This is the "golden rule" of organizational design. When the CTO title is interpreted as a technology czar, the operations group becomes a passive dumping ground and cannot deliver or be held accountable for the cost or quality of its services. This is absolutely counter to my vision of a healthy organization where everybody is an internal entrepreneur empowered to run a business within the business. OK, so maybe your CTO isn't a czar.

Another form this role takes is the "genius" reporting to the CIO who is annointed with responsibility for the future of technology throughout the IT organization.

This interpretation gives the CTO three roles: The CTO tracks emerging technologies and plans technology directions for the entire IT department; the CTO coordinates all the various IT engineers who may report to others to ensure integration; and the CTO takes on the really tough new-technology projects like major infrastructure revamps. First, one person or small group is so much smarter than everybody else that he can do the technology research in every branch of IT better than all those who have dedicated their careers to a specialty within IT.

To me, this is utter arrogance. This structure is symptomatic of an organization that can't figure out how to set aside a portion of everybody's time for learning and innovation, and instead partitions off an entire group that does everybody's thinking for them. The rest of the staff are denied the exciting part of their jobs—researching new technologies—and are disempowered as entrepreneurs since they cannot plan their future product lines.

Second, the CTO tells everybody else how to design their systems in the name of integration. I guess this role must be needed because the rest of the staff refuses to team with one another on projects, or to collaborate on standards decisions and a vision of future systems.

Again, it's using a CTO to make up for a fundamental fault in the rest of the IT organization—the lack of teamwork. And third, whenever the going gets tough or really interesting , the CTO takes the project away from the rest of the staff. Everybody else is denied those career-growth opportunities. As a result, they aren't given the chance to gain experiences that will help them with their more mundane everyday work. And, of course, this is highly demotivational.

This, too, is using a group to make up for an organizational breakdown: The organization doesn't give all staff the support they need such as project management support or time for professional development to take on stretch assignments. When you use a CTO to make up for deficiencies in the rest of the organization—time to think, teamwork and project-management or new-technology competencies—the consequences are dire.

On one hand, you create a bottleneck for innovation within the CTO group. On the other hand, you deny the rest of the staff the learning opportunities they need to do their jobs and the career-growth opportunities they need to remain motivated and loyal. A fourth incarnation of the CTO title is somewhat more benign, but still far from ideal.