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January 29, 2001

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Working With The CTO And The CIO

By Eric Chabrow

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ost mainstream, nontechnology companies have either a chief information officer or chief technology officer; very few have both. In these corporations, the CIO is synonymous with the CTO. Companies that have both titles tend to be either technology vendors or dot-coms, with the CTO heavily involved in product development and the CIO focused on internal and external information systems.

But one nontechnology company that recently added the CTO position to its roster of corporate officers--which already included a CIO--is Turner Corp., the $4.8 billion general contractor in Dallas known for its many visible projects, including the construction under way in Seattle of a football stadium for the National Footfall League's Seahawks and venerable landmark buildings such as the United Nations' Secretariat and Madison Square Gardens in New York.

In July, Turned hired ServiceMaster Co. CIO Stephen Reiter as its first CTO to champion and facilitate all technology, not just IT. Despite being an old-line company, Turner has its CIO reporting to the CTO. Reiter, an executive VP, explains that his role is strategic--he takes a stratospheric view of how all types of technology can be used to benefit Turner--while CIO Douglas Nies' role is tactical, implementing and supporting IT systems. "Much of my role is focused on the external world, whereas the CIO is focused more internally," says Reiter, who co-authored Supply Chain Optimization: Building the Strongest Total Business Network [Berrett-Koehler Publisher, 1996].

For example, Reiter works with senior executives throughout the company as well as with the construction industry consortium, AECventure, to identify ways to promote collaboration among the general contractor and its suppliers, customers, and subcontractors. Once a strategy is in place, Reiter says, Nies and his troops would select the project-management software and other tools needed to implement the collaborative system.