New York CTO | Jon Williams

East coast vs. West Coast

Jon Williams — 2008-06-16T05:39:37-08:00

There is no getting away from it in the US, there is the East coast and the West coast, and they are quite different when it comes to CTOs (in my opinion). This gross generalization can be easily shot down, but let me move ahead anyway. West coast CTO = super-tech ex-developer. East coast CTO = less tech but very business focused. Have I offended anyone yet? Not my intention. My point is that we don't see a lot of transporting of CTOs between the coasts. But I love it every time I get to visit and do business in... READ MORE

Agile and the social developer

Jon Williams — 2008-06-12T08:42:36-08:00

I was talking the other day to a technologist who had made the switch early in his career from software development to infrastructure. I asked him why, his answer:- "I didn't want to spend days not interacting with people". When I was a software developer, it was a lonesome affair. There was no open source community, just manuals and API docs. I got the occasional check-in from my boss and questions to a sysadmin, but mainly was left alone (and liked it). My response to passers-by as to my well-being was often a grunt, as I maniacally focused on the... READ MORE

Interim CTO

Jon Williams — 2008-06-09T12:00:43-08:00

When a CEO leaves a company, usually the first thing that happens is that the sitting Chairman is appointed as interim CEO. Their job is to steer the company until a full-time CEO is hired. What do companies do when their CTO leaves? Usually get by without one while they begin the search for a new one. Something that I've experienced recently at both my old and new companies is an Interim (or Transitional) CTO someone to take care of technology until a full-time CTO is found. An interim CTO doesn't start coding software nor configuring servers. Their job is... READ MORE

Bloggers beware

Jon Williams — 2008-05-08T05:42:01-08:00

As we are now all a part of the brave new world of blogging, I am personally discovering some of the unintended outcomes of a CTO blog. At my previous company, I started blogging well after I became CTO, and some of my team read it out of curiosity. But now at my new company, the new technology team got the chance to read my blog before I arrived, as did other department members. An experience on my first day in the office was someone stopping me in the hallway, and saying "you must be Jon Williams, I read your... READ MORE

The last 21 days

Jon Williams — 2008-04-17T07:00:48-08:00

Many things have a beginning and ending. Projects, computers, vacations, games, school, friends, businesses (sometimes), life, and jobs. Some things have planned endings (vacation, school) and others are random by chance. While there is no shortage of management literature on starting new jobs or the "first 90 days" there seems to be little written about the process of leaving a company, we’ll call this “the last 21 days”. I am now in the midst of both an ending and a new beginning. After 4 years at Kaplan, I am leaving to join iVillage, a division of NBC Universal. I have... READ MORE

Work and play?

Jon Williams — 2008-04-15T09:14:08-08:00

It used to be that work and play had clear delineations, but not anymore, at least not for me, and I believe not for gen-Yers. For example, while on a recent Seattle vacation, I (1) had lunch with a couple of CTO buddies (play), (2) visited my company's Seattle location (work) (3) afternoon visit with some in-laws (play). But interestingly the 2 play examples are somewhat work-related as we talked tech (my brother-in-law has a tech startup and I was a beta tester). Add to this the daily stream of emails, of which I responded to the all the simple... READ MORE

Open source is good for IT

Jon Williams — 2008-04-03T08:11:35-08:00

I gave a presentation at OSBC (open source business conference) last week. I don't often speak at conferences, but I have been working on an open source strategy for 4 years and believed that presenting that plan might help other CTOs/CIOs in their open source plans. Two bloggers (Matt Asay and Zack Urlocker) reviewed my presentation at http://www.cnet.com/8301-13505_1-9903582-16.html?tag=head and http://weblog.infoworld.com/openresource/archives/2008/03/kaplan_guiding.html?source=rss . First, Kaplan was not the only company describing their use of open source. Other included CBS interactive, Paypal, Weather Channel interactive, NY times, Electronic Arts, LA times, Christian Science Monitor. In addition, a full 40% of attendees were IT... READ MORE

The wisdom of herds

Jon Williams — 2008-03-27T07:36:12-08:00

In evaluating technologies, it can often be a struggle to compare competing products. When done diligently, you will probably use a product comparison matrix with weighted scoring. By the way, allow yourself many weeks to collect and evaluate all of the data. And if other people are involved, then also expect lots of meeting to argue pros and cons. And if you also want to do a test drive, there's more time gone. And you haven't built a darned thing yet! There is another way, but unfortunately it is not always available to us. This other way is:- "What do... READ MORE

Search as a utility

Jon Williams — 2008-03-13T09:18:31-08:00

We were discussing search at a recent NY CTO club meeting, and a thought occurred to me (as it frequently does in these meetings):- Is search a utility? Meaning, is search a plug-in function and not something to be developed by the tech team. Every system we build has a search function built into it, usually hand-crafted (proprietary). Why? When I programmed years ago, every system had a screen-writer, which updated the characters and pixels on the screen. But no more, this is now a utility provided by the operating system. It would be crazy to do otherwise. I have... READ MORE

Effective post-mortems

Jon Williams — 2008-03-03T08:33:43-08:00

One of my tasks as a CTO is running post-mortem meetings after we have an incident or outage. This is an extremely important step toward making progress in system stability and performance. Teams that don't do post-mortems miss the opportunity to get ahead of system issues. Post-mortem meetings take some finessing, they can easily turn into a blame-game, or he-said she-said. So let me layout how I run post-mortem meetings, and how that makes them most effective. First, important rules for post-mortems:- 1) Timely to issue (next day is best) 2) All relevant members present (no meeting if someone is... READ MORE

Email wrong-number

Jon Williams — 2008-02-19T10:14:22-08:00

Sometimes technology can have significant and unintended cultural impacts. Email in its infancy was a minefield, in that we never realized it was an inappropriate (and one-sided) tool for expressing emotions. It took us a while, but we finally taught ourselves to reread and pause before hitting the send button. In Japanese, there is a word for "unsay" to take something back, but alas not in English, nor is there a reliable unsend in email. I've been using a Blackberry for phone and email for a while, and I've noticed an interesting phenomenon. I will call it the "Friendly wrong... READ MORE

Worthless processes

Jon Williams — 2008-02-14T12:44:03-08:00

When reviewing a write-up or new process/project proposal, a filter that I will apply is "Does this make a difference?". Let's say one of your team was asked to write up a plan for "managing execution risk", and they wrote a document describing a process for doing this. After you read the document, you decide that while it all makes logical sense, it really will not make a difference. For example, tracking how many lines of code are written each day makes no difference. Who cares? Its business outcomes that matter. As a CTO, it is your job recognize tasks... READ MORE

Birds of a Feather

Jon Williams — 2008-01-28T08:50:21-08:00

One of my most rewarding experiences is spending time with other CTOs. Who else knows what its like to do what you do? Nothing like hanging out over chinese food and a few beers with like-minded colleagues that I trust. Earlier in my career, I felt competitive with my peers, both at work and outside. I felt that it was an "either/or" proposition, either I succeeded/got promoted, or they did. I was comparing myself to them. Eventually I realized that my success (and others) was independent of anyone else. If I was successful, I would be rewarded, regardless of anyone... READ MORE

Technology around the globe

Jon Williams — 2007-12-10T17:46:44-08:00

David Goodman, CTO of International Rescue Committee (http://www.theirc.org) blogged about his recent trip to Africa, where he spent time in Kenyan and Ethopian refugee camps and reviewing technology needs (http://ctoinafrica.blogspot.com). One discovery was that the internet band-width was poor, and David's blog got me thinking in general about how technology is different around the world. I was going to title this posting "global technology", but that implies we use the same technologies around the world, but that's just not true. Yes, there are similarities, but from a CTO's point of view technology management is quite different once you leave the... READ MORE

Every CTO should be on Facebook

Jon Williams — 2007-11-26T06:46:21-08:00

Every CTO should be on Facebook. Why? Facebook could well be what applications look and work like in the future. I don't know if Facebook itself will persist, but certainly the ideas behind it will. By now, I assume most of us are using LinkedIn, and finding it to be a valuable business networking tool. While Plaxo is mimicing LinkedIn, LinkedIn is mimicing Facebook. You can now load your picture in Linkedin. And LinkedIn just added "today", "yesterday", "last week". Guess where that comes from? Facebook. "Facebook?", you say. But that's mainly kids. I am not saying that you will... READ MORE