CIO? CTO? Who are these people?.

Well, both are Chief Officers of some description, one “does” Information and one “does” Technology – certainly that’s the plan. Large museums might be lucky enough to have one or the other, some might even have both. Small museums usually have neither. If they’re lucky, they have “Bob the IT guy” who thinks he’s both.

Believe it or not, “Bob the IT guy” is a real person…

Musematic: So, Bob, thanks for joining us today.

BTITG: Thanks, I rarely get the chance to talk about this kind of thing. Too many gadgets, too little time.

Musematic: Yeah, tell me about it. But anyway, tell us about your job, Bob.

BTITG: Well, I have a part time tech job at the Museum of Unfeasibly Small Ephemera. Actually, I’m their CIO. I handle all their network and computer support and do their website and their backend database stuff. The site is waaaay cool. I built a PHP shopping cart, which is integrated with the PERL ticketing application I built a couple of years ago. I’m just finishing an Ajax-based calendaring application, which links into the XML repository generated out of their antique, custom-built collections management system. I had to build the API for that since that company disappeared years ago and it makes their collections available online through a FLASH XII application. I’m on Adobe’s beta list so I’m using the latest beta rev. – which is pretty close to primetime – and I haven’t had any problems reported on our website. My next project is going to be a Web Mash-Up based on VoiceXML, Ajax and Rails, but I can’t tell you about that yet – its going to be waaay cool though.

Musematic: Wow, sounds like you really know your stuff.

BTITG: Yup – the museum would be lost without me. If I get hit by a truck, they’re in big trouble.

Musematic: Well, thanks for your time Bob.

[Any similarity between BTITG and any persons living or dead, is entirely coincidental.]

So, anyone know a good truck driver?

Bob thinks he’s doing his museum a great service, but in reality he’s causing them a lot of pain, heartache and tears before bedtime. Bob loves technology but lacks vision. He’s paying no attention to the sustainability or the ongoing maintenance and support of what he’s creating. Bob might be a CTO in the making, but he’s not a CIO. The truth about Bob is that he’s a freewheeling geek, in it for the technology.

Small museums who have to rely on volunteer or part time help to advance their information strategies and technology support, face significant challenges. But however big or small an institution is, the CIO and CTO roles are conceptually valid and applying them to any technology-related project should be de rigueur.

A CIO doesn’t have to be technical person. A CIO should be stewarding the information of the institution, that means making business, policy, dissemination and interpretation decisions on the information about the institution’s collections. A CIO might understand the capabilities and limitations of technology, but that’s not the prerequisite. These decisions should come from a curator, a museum director or someone who understands the information, the institution and the audience. A good CIO needs to understand the information and the audience first, and the technology that delivers it, second. Actually, you could argue that it would be better for a CIO not to understand the technology – being divorced from the technology might help make a clearer strategic decision.

A CTO on the other hand does have to a technical person, but unlike “Bob the IT Guy”, a good CTO understands the benefit of strategic planning and the need for consistency of delivered technology and for documentation. One of the biggest technology problems big and small museums face is IML. I can see the commercial now…

“Does your institution suffer from a complete lack of technology staff? Does your institution suffer from mild or acute loss of technology staff? Does this leave you with feelings of helplessness and anxiety and wondering who’s going to fix that widget? Has the only guy that knew how that thing worked, unexpectedly ‘moved on’? If you answered yes to any of these questions, then you have Institutional Memory Loss – Ask your Museum Director about ‘TechoManage’”.

[Read this bit very quickly] Side effects include: documentation, extended development cycles and proper technology strategy, management and sustainability.”

Institutional Memory Loss can be mitigated by making sensible technology decisions. For example:

• Choose third-party-supported software in you can – picking up the phone to call Support is better that trying to track down wasisname who wrote the application
  
• If you have to build a custom application, ensure its written in a ubiquitous language that you could easily hire someone to maintain or enhance
• If you choose Open Source Software, ensure there is a community backing it, with production implementations to look at
  
• Always document – documentation specifying the architecture, workflows, business logic, sponsors, users, etc, etc, should be part of any technology project and it should make no assumptions. (Business Logic is a ‘biggie’ – stay blogged for some ranting on that)
• Wherever possible don’t get into the hardware support and maintenance business – this is expensive and time consuming.

The best technology implementations, on any scale, are those where there has been a clear divide between setting the requirements and objectives (CIO role) and the implementation and delivery (CTO role). When establishing requirements for a project, ensure what you want to do is what your audience wants. Asking them may seem obvious, but I don’t think we do that as often as we should. When implementing a project, as unglamorous as it may be not to do a web mash-up with the latest technology, consider the sustainability and complexity of what’s being implemented. Complex systems require complex support, despite what the vendor and Bob the IT Guy say. Anyway you look at it, it’s going to be easier to find one guy who knows the one technology that is implemented throughout your institution rather than one each for the five technologies Bob implemented.

Technology is a solution to a problem or a need. The decision to use technology is based on meeting strategic and audience goals and it will be a much better place if the people making decisions about information, how to use it, what to do with it and how to present it, aren’t the ones building it.