Join The Club And Get Ahead

Computerworld - Outside of a few MBA programs, there are no schools that formally teach IT professionals how to become chief technology officers. But aspiring technology managers and CTOs who want to learn from their peers can receive an informal education through a number of regional CTO clubs. While there are only a handful of these groups, they appear to be broad enough in scope to help both junior IT managers and seasoned CTOs. More recently, members say, they've been especially helpful to managers by providing guidance on how to steer budgets, projects and staffs through tough economic times.

"For the last year, CTOs have needed more mentoring, whether to help downsize their staffs, manage the same workload on a smaller budget or make use of legacy systems at a time when they can't make expenditures for new ones," says Curtis Brown, CTO at Oxygen Media Inc., a New York-based operator of a cable TV channel for women.

Jon Williams, CTO at Grey Healthcare Group Inc., a New York-based advertising and communications firm for the health care industry, has pushed for the creation of professional CTO groups as a way to help mentor prospective technology leaders. He is also a co-founder of the New York CTO Club.

The New York CTO Club is limited to about 30 members, who meet for breakfast once a month. Membership and attendance at meetings are by invitation only, and the group doesn't have a public Web page. Through the group, Williams tries to identify people who are potential CTOs and help them learn management techniques that will serve them well.

"Almost everyone in the group is a good technologist, so they usually don't need help in that area. We try to help them with management and communications skills," says Williams, who was previously an IT consultant.

Path to CTO

Good technologists often follow the same career path, says Williams. They graduate, become proficient in IT and then discover that they haven't learned management basics such as how to run a company or manage people. Williams says that the people he aims to help are the ones who have come to the realization that being an expert technologist is not everything you need to be a CTO.

In the Midwest, the Chicago CTO Roundtable meets monthly for what co-founder John Adams calls an opportunity "to bounce ideas off each other, whether it's about the prices of hardware and software or staffing issues." Adams, vice president of technology at CoolSavings Inc., a Chicago-based company that handles corporate sales promotions, says the mission of the roundtable is to provide a forum for discussing common CTO issues and to help some of its 15 members or their guests "who jumped or were pushed into being CTOs a little too early.''