InBrief: CIO and CTO Roles

What It Is: Technology organizations are sometimes led through a combination of CIO and CTO roles, working towards a shared vision, each having a clear focus in the interest of promoting IT excellence

Why It Matters: Technology continues to advance at a rate, particularly with the introduction of AI, that exceeds many organizations ability to respond effectively.  Having the right leadership in place to develop strategy, consider longer-term implications of decisions made in ongoing delivery, and govern execution can be key to avoiding technical debt, while promoting delivery excellence over time

Five Types of CTOs

• Technology Strategist – This is the most common modern orientation, focused on enablement, simplification, optimization, and capability delivery
• Mistitled CIO – This occurs when the CTO actually has all the typical CIO responsibilities and they are fulfilling that role in every way, leading IT, setting direction, etc. without the CIO title
• Futurist – This occurs where the CTO plays a more directional, but not action-oriented role, focused on white/position papers, and ideation
• Infrastructure Lead – This is the historical role of a CTO, focused more on hosting, networking, reliability, performance, and operations with the CIO covering applications and data
• Lead Designer / Senior Developer – This generally the case in start-up/smaller scale product environments, where the CTO leads the product design and helps code the solution

High-Level Differences

• CIO focuses on the “what”, obtains business alignment and identifies capabilities, along with desired technology capabilities, focuses on the customer and providing vision and direction
• CTO focuses on the “how”, understands desired business capabilities, determines how to provide technical capabilities and deliver on commitments, partnering with the broader team
• Both roles participate in governance, CIO provides and aligns business priorities, CTO provides and aligns technical priorities in support of the CIO

When It Makes Sense to Have a CTO in Addition to a CIO

• There is sufficient time required working with business partners that additional support is needed to define and evolve the technology strategy and work actively with delivery leaders
• There is considerable complexity in the technology footprint, a high degree of transformation, or substantial integration required across ongoing delivery where having the CIO focused in the weeds of execution could result in underserving the business team and executive leadership
• There is a need to move multiple levers (cloud platform migration, modernization, core platform implementation, AI integration, etc.) that a level of dedicated focus and oversight is needed to work through the risks and impacts of various strategies to define the best technology solution
• When the scale of the organization in people, internally, externally, including customers, suppliers, and partners exceeds one person’s ability to manage relationships effectively
• Where the CIO has a business background and it is helpful to supplement their capabilities with a more technology-focused leader overall

Benefits of Having a “Healthy Tension”

• There can be a natural tension created when there is a separation of roles, because a CIO generally is incented to deliver new business capabilities at speed and the CTO should be incented to do things “right” to minimize long-term cost of ownership, managing technical debt, promoting standards and governance, and improving predictability of the delivery environment
• Business delivery will generally be top priority, but having a CTO can mitigate the impact of tradeoffs made during delivery, particularly in large programs, where consequences are higher

The Downside:

• There is incremental cost associated with adding leadership roles, there can be confusion across the broader IT leadership if roles and responsibilities aren’t clear, and a strong CIO/CTO partnership is important to making the role effective in practice
• That being said, the value to any organization with a relatively large technology footprint would likely far exceed the cost of having a CTO focused on managing complexity and optimizing cost

The Difference Between CTO and Chief Architect

• The CTO is the keeper of the overall technology strategy, apps, data, infrastructure, security integration with all of the above (working with the CISO), inclusive of the delivery environment
• A “Chief Architect” tends to be more narrowly focused on application and data architecture strategy, but with awareness on how to incorporate cloud and platform strategy as well
• A Chief Architect could be a role reporting to the CTO, depending on the scale of the organization, focused more on defining, modernizing, or rationalizing the enterprise ecosystem of connected components, acting more like a designer than a strategist, where a CTO without this role would generally do both at the enterprise level

For Additional Information: InBrief: IT Excellence, Fast and Cheap, Isn’t Good

Excellence doesn’t happen by accident.  Courageous leadership is essential.

Put value creation first, be disciplined, but nimble.

Want to discuss more?  Please send me a message.  I’m happy to explore with you.

-CJG 01/17/2026