We Are All Technology Companies Now Marc FronsCIO, The New York Times@marcfrons
‘The thing I have learned at IBM is that
culture is everything’
– Lou Gerstner, Chairman & CEO of IBM from 1993 until 2002.
What Kind of Company do You
Work For?
Some Traditional Attitudes About Tech Departments
A cost center
Purely a service organization
Something to be offshored or otherwise outsourced
Something you buy from outside vendors, not have your own team build
Internet technology is inseparable from the creative aspects of the medium itself
Should we put
the engineers in charge?
A Media Company AND
a Technology Company
The State of NYT Digital 8 Years Ago
Less than 20 engineers
Separated from the company & print newspaper
Worked in a separate physical location
Little interaction with newsroom
Hack Days
Monthly, on Fridays
Internal AND external
participants
Pick whatever you want to
work on
Hack together with journalists,
engineers
Present to the group
NYTimes Chrome App: Times Skimmer
100% Days
Times Open
Times-hosted
monthly technology
forum
Agile Development
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/05/25/sunday-review/corporate-taxes.html?ref=sunday
Build, Not Buy
The Advantages of Building
Product Differentiation – no more ‘me too’ solutions
Vertical integration -- reduces complexity, and makes a coherent customer data strategy easier to achieve
Allows for more flexible and iterative solutions
Competitive advantage over companies without strong tech teams
Attract and retain top tech talent
Makes your team better able to evaluate vendors when a 3rd party solution makes sense
A great Tech team raises the bar
for product managers
If you want to innovate…
Technologists need to be peers with other creative and business leaders in your company Technology is not just a service organization
Build, don’t buy strategic technology that is core to your business and where success is based on rapid innovation
Own your data And make sure you can store, analyze, visualize, and act on
the insights
Embrace new development processes such as continuous delivery that stress iteration and automation
Empower product managers who understand technology and think in terms of strategic capabilities, not one-off solutions
Thank You
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