What are the capabilities required to make you a great CTO?

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Background

I was recently asked the following question in room of senior business leaders

In todays business environment Chief Technology Officers need to balance the needs of digital transformation vs the need to keep the business running. Cyber Security, Risk Management and Emerging Technology all impact on how ICT delivers the services the organisation requires to thrive. What capabilities/qualities does a Chief Technology Officer need to chart a path to allow the business deliver on it’s promises to it’s customers.

First Reaction

Wow. Panic. What was the first part of the question again.

Ok, Stop, Think, I should know this, Think, Still Nothing, Think, Got Something. Ok lets go.

In my opinion

A CTO role does not only bring technical knowledge to the table, it needs to to be able to lead through uncertainty. It must give the organisation confidence that as technology landscapes change, the organisation can respond deliberately rather than reactively, the goal is to minimise any bumps in the road so the organisations ICT services remain secure, resilient, and aligned to organisational outcomes.

I believe the question is looking to identify if I know the value a CTO role brings to the organisation and what are some of the capabilities the people who occupy that role should bring to the table. Here’s what I came up with.

Capabilities, in no particular order

• Communication and Influence
• Enterprise Architecture
• Organisational Change Management
• Cyber Security and Risk Governance
• Technology Horizon Scanning
• People
• Vendor and Supply Chain Management
• ICT Governance

Communication and Influence

A CTO spends as much time with Executive Leadership as they do with the ICT team. The ability to present complex technology risk in plain language, build trust with leadership, and advocate for investment is a core capability. Without it, technology strategy remains disconnected from organisational decision-making, and ICT is reduced to a service desk rather than a strategic partner.

Equally important is the CTO’s ability to build and maintain networks both inside and outside the organisation. Internally, this means cultivating strong relationships with business unit leaders and service managers to ensure ICT priorities remain aligned with operational needs and organisational goals. The CTO who only engages with the business when a project starts or a system fails will always be one step behind. Consistent engagement builds the mutual understanding that allows technology investment to be targeted where it genuinely matters.

Externally, the CTO must maintain active connections with peers in other organisations, industry bodies, and the vendor community. Peer networks provide invaluable insight into how comparable organisations are navigating shared challenges such as managing cybersecurity risk, governing AI adoption, or delivering digital services within constrained budgets. Vendor relationships, managed well, go beyond contract management they give the CTO early visibility of emerging capabilities, honest assessments of product direction, and the leverage to negotiate outcomes that serve the organisation rather than just the supplier.

Together, these internal and external networks ensure the CTO is never operating in isolation and that the ICT strategy is continuously informed, tested, and refined against the real world.

Enterprise Architecture

Enterprise Architecture (EA) is a foundational capability for any CTO because it connects technology decisions to organisational outcomes. Without it, a CTO is managing systems and projects in isolation, unable to see how they relate to each other or how they support the delivery of business services.

EA allows the CTO to align ICT roadmaps directly to strategic objectives, ensuring technology investment is purposeful and prioritised against genuine organisational need rather than reactive demand. It also provides the ability to assess the impact of change before it happens — mapping dependencies across business processes, information flows, applications, and infrastructure so that decisions are made with full visibility of risk and complexity.

Organisational Change Management

A CTO who understands technology but not people will consistently deliver projects that fail to land. Organisational change management is the capability that bridges the gap between a technically successful implementation and one that actually delivers value. Technology changes behaviour, it changes how people work, how services are delivered, and how the organisation operates. Without an understanding of change management, a CTO will underestimate resistance, overestimate readiness, and wonder why adoption is poor despite the technology working exactly as designed.

Understanding the organisation’s appetite for change is critical to sequencing and pacing the ICT roadmap intelligently. Not every organisation can absorb significant technology change at the same rate, and that capacity fluctuates depending on what else is happening across the business. A CTO who ignores this will overload staff and managers with simultaneous changes, creating fatigue, resistance, and ultimately a loss of confidence in ICT as a delivery partner. The roadmap must be calibrated not just to technical dependencies but to the human capacity of the organisation to adapt.

Cyber Security and Risk Governance

Understanding cybersecurity frameworks such as the Australian Government’s Essential Eight or ISO 27001 are important foundations. However, a CTO needs to lift the maturity of these two domains beyond technical controls to encompass the business processes they support. Frameworks alone do not create security — they create a baseline. What protects an organisation in practice is the culture that forms around them.

A cybersecurity and risk-based culture needs to be deliberately developed and nurtured over time. It cannot be mandated through policy or achieved through annual compliance training. It is built through consistent leadership behaviour, clear organisational expectations, and the visible integration of security and risk thinking into everyday decision-making. When staff see that the CTO and executive leadership treat security as a genuine organisational value rather than an IT obligation, behaviour follows.

Embedding cyber and risk controls into activities such as procurement, vendor management, project delivery, and staff behaviour should be considered the minimal viable product — the baseline beneath which no mature organisation should operate. Procurement that does not assess vendor security posture, projects that treat security as an afterthought, and staff who are unaware of their role in protecting organisational data are not just weaknesses — they are liabilities that no technical control can fully compensate for.

The CTO’s role is to make security and risk everyone’s responsibility without making it everyone’s burden. That means designing controls that are proportionate and practical, communicating risk in language that resonates with each audience, and creating an environment where raising a security concern is encouraged rather than avoided. When that culture is in place, the organisation does not just comply with its security obligations, it is genuinely resilient.

Technology Horizon Scanning

Emerging technologies are both an opportunity and a liability simultaneously. The CTO must be able to evaluate, adopt, and govern new technologies faster than the organisation’s risk appetite would naturally allow, while ensuring that adoption does not outpace governance. This is one of the defining tensions of the modern CTO role. How it is managed separates organisations that lead from those that are perpetually catching up.

The challenge is that emerging technology does not wait for budget cycles, policy reviews, or organisational readiness. Artificial intelligence is the most immediate example. Tools that can transform service delivery, automate routine processes, and generate significant efficiency gains are already in the hands of staff, often without formal evaluation or approval. The CTO who responds to this reality with blanket restriction will lose the confidence of the business. The CTO who responds with uncritical enthusiasm will expose the organisation to data, privacy, and reputational risk that is difficult to recover from.

The answer lies in building a structured but agile evaluation capability, a repeatable process that allows the organisation to assess emerging technologies quickly, pilot them safely, and make clear go or no-go decisions within a timeframe that matches the pace of change. This process must consider not just technical capability but data handling, integration risk, vendor viability, alignment to strategy, and community impact.

The CTO must also maintain an active horizon scanning practice, staying connected to emerging trends through peer networks, industry bodies, and vendor engagement before technologies arrive at the organisation’s door rather than after. Being proactive rather than reactive is what allows the CTO to bring considered recommendations to leadership rather than crisis responses to problems that were foreseeable.

Ultimately, the goal is not to adopt every emerging technology, it is to ensure the organisation never misses the ones that matter, and never sleepwalks into the ones that harm.

People

People are what make everything else work. A CTO can have the most sophisticated architecture, the most mature governance framework, and the most current cybersecurity controls but without a capable, confident, and engaged team, none of it delivers. Investing in people is not a soft capability sitting alongside the technical ones. It is the foundation that everything else is built on.

People perform at their best when they understand the why and the what of what they are doing. A team that is simply executing instructions without context will always underperform a team that understands the strategic purpose behind their work. The CTO’s responsibility is to connect the ICT team’s daily effort to the organisation’s broader goals , to make it clear that securing a system, maintaining infrastructure, or delivering a project is not just a technical task, it is a contribution to the services the organisation relies on. That connection between purpose and practice is what transforms a functional team into a high performing one.

Empowerment and accountability must exist together. People need to feel trusted to make decisions within their domain, and they need to understand that with that trust comes genuine accountability for outcomes. A culture where decisions are always escalated upward is a culture where capability never develops and where the CTO becomes a bottleneck rather than a leader. Equally, accountability without empowerment is simply blame and it destroys the confidence and initiative that good teams are built on. The CTO must model the balance between the two, demonstrating that delegation is real and that ownership is respected.

Building capability across both internal and external team members is a continuous obligation, not a periodic event. The technology landscape changes faster than any individual can track, and the CTO must create an environment where learning is structured, supported, and treated as a legitimate use of time. This applies equally to vendor partners and managed service providers, the CTO who invests in the capability of their broader ecosystem gets better outcomes than one who treats external partners purely as a contracted resource.

Perhaps most importantly, the CTO must build an environment where people feel psychologically safe. Mistakes will happen in any technology environment, systems will fail, projects will encounter problems, and judgement calls will occasionally be wrong. The question is not whether mistakes occur but how the organisation responds to them. When mistakes are treated as opportunities to learn rather than occasions for blame, people take ownership, surface problems early, and continuously improve. When they are met with blame, people hide problems, avoid risk, and the organisation loses the honest visibility it needs to function well. Creating that safe environment is a leadership responsibility that sits squarely with the CTO.

Vendor and Supply Chain Management

Most ICT services are now delivered through third parties, and this fundamentally changes the nature of the CTO’s responsibility. It is no longer sufficient to manage technology internally, the CTO must have the capability to assess and continuously monitor the security and performance posture of the entire vendor ecosystem. A single weak link in the supply chain can expose the organisation to risks that no amount of internal control can mitigate.

The rise of cloud services has added a dimension of commercial and operational risk that organisations frequently underestimate. Hyperscale providers have the market power to increase prices, change product direction, or withdraw services with limited notice and little regard for the disruption this causes downstream. Organisations that have built critical dependencies on a single platform or provider without an exit strategy are not just technically exposed, they are commercially vulnerable. The CTO must ensure that vendor relationships are structured to preserve the organisation’s ability to adapt, renegotiate, and where necessary transition, without catastrophic disruption to service delivery.

Effective vendor and supply chain management requires the CTO to maintain a clear picture of how value is created across the entire ICT ecosystem. Every component of the supply chain, from infrastructure providers to software vendors to managed service partners must be assessed for its fitness for purpose, its security posture, and its strategic alignment to organisational goals. This is not a one-time assessment at contract signing. It is a continuous monitoring discipline that tracks performance, flags emerging risk, and ensures accountability is maintained throughout the life of each relationship.

Organisations must design their vendor relationships and supply chain management frameworks to ensure that bumps in the road are identified and addressed before problems become crises. This means building contractual protections that go beyond service level agreements, establishing regular governance touchpoints with key vendors, and maintaining enough internal capability to meaningfully oversee what external parties are delivering. The CTO who outsources everything and retains no critical knowledge internally has not reduced risk they have simply transferred visibility of it.

ICT Governance

Clear governance is one of the most important and most misunderstood capabilities a CTO must possess. It is frequently perceived as bureaucratic overhead — a set of rules and processes that slow delivery and frustrate innovation. In reality, the opposite is true. Governance could be considered the brakes that help the organisation navigate the turns faster in times of uncertainty. Just as a car with good brakes can travel faster with confidence because the driver knows they can slow and steer when needed, an organisation with clear technology governance can move faster because leadership knows there are controls in place to manage risk, catch poor decisions early, and course correct before consequences become costly.

Without governance, speed becomes recklessness. Technology decisions get made without visibility, investments are duplicated, risks accumulate undetected, and the organisation loses the ability to answer basic questions about what it owns, what it is committed to, and what it is exposed to. In a local government context, where public trust and legislative compliance are non-negotiable, ungoverned technology change is not an option.

The CTO must build and maintain governance frameworks that are proportionate, practical, and understood across the organisation. This means clear decision rights — who approves what, at what threshold, with what visibility. It means architecture and investment governance that ensures new technology commitments align to strategy before money is spent. And it means risk governance that keeps leadership informed of the organisation’s exposure in real time, not just at audit time.

Good governance does not constrain the CTO, it gives the CTO the credibility and organisational confidence to move decisively when it matters most.

Whats Next?

I’ve identified the capabilities that I think a CTO role needs to successfully deliver ICT services in todays rapidly changing business environment. However I feel the job is only half done. I will spend some time developing future articles on how I see these capabilities getting used and some of my experiences, both good and bad that influenced my career.

Feedback

To all CTO’s and aspiring CTO’s I am interested in your feedback on these capabilities and what you believe is necessary to be a successful CTO in todays environment.