THE EFFECTIVENESS OF THE CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER

The significant role of technology in strategic business activities and new-product development has driven companies to create a Chief Technology Officer (CTO) position to lead and direct technology development activities. The CTO is a new and evolving role, having been first utilized only within the last few decades. Although the position is becoming more widely used, there is still a lack of understanding as to the specific benefits a CTO position can bring to an organization. There has been little research to date focusing on the CTO role and even less with empirical data. The purpose of this paper is to fill an important gap by analyzing a number of innovation and financial metrics to assess the impact of the CTO on an organization's performance. An analysis of the data shows that the CTO role is effective in promoting both innovation and financial improvements. This provides support for the creation and continued use of the CTO position in companies. An unexpected outcome of this research was a reduction in CTO effectiveness with increasing company size.