We Are All Tech Companies by Marc Frons, CIO, New York Times
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New York Times CIO on How All Companies Are Tech Companies
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We Are All Tech Companies by Marc Frons, CIO, New York Times
- 1. We Are All Technology Companies Now Marc Frons CIO, The New York Times @marcfrons
- 2. ‘The thing I have learned at IBM is that culture is everything’ – Lou Gerstner, Chairman & CEO of IBM from 1993 until 2002.
- 3. What Kind of Company do You Work For?
- 4. 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
- 5. Internet technology is inseparable from the creative aspects of the medium itself
- 7. Should we put the engineers in charge?
- 10. A Media Company AND a Technology Company
- 11. 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
- 12. 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
- 13. NYTimes Chrome App: Times Skimmer
- 14. 100% Days
- 34. Build, Not Buy
- 35. 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
- 44. A great Tech team raises the bar for product managers
- 48. 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
- 49. Thank You
Editor's Notes
- I wanted to talk today about cultural transformation -- the changes we need to make to think and act more like technology companies. Because I agree with Lou Gerstner – when it comes to innovation, culture is everything.
- The fundamental question for me is: What kind of company do you work for? The answer used to be easy: it was whatever product or service you sold to your customers. Unless your business was hardware or software -- a technology company -- to the extent you thought about it at all, technology was merely a way to get things done. At best, it was either some mysterious process better left to outside experts; at worst, a necessary evil.
- The technologists who worked for companies with these attitudes generally were very good at one thing: following orders. Unfortunately, and not surprisingly, they were terrible at taking the initiative – or at being innovative.
- Perhaps that wasn’t such a big problem in the days before the Internet, or even before Web 2.0. But now, as we all know, technology is central to every part of our business. And on the Internet, technology is so much more than just a way to get things done. It’s inseparable from the creative aspects of the medium itself. That’s why some of the best ideas for new and innovative businesses come from technologists.
- So how do we tap into the energy and creativity of smart technologists? And how do we do it when we work for media companies, not tech companies?
- The way I think about it: I work for a media company AND a technology company, one where technologists work side-by-side with their colleagues in the Newsroom and on the business side. It’s true, these days everyone is talking about interdisciplinary collaboration. The challenge is to make it real. To do that, to attract and retain the brightest technical talent and harness their brilliance, technologists need to be peers with the other creative and business leaders at a company. They can’t be brought in after a product has been conceived elsewhere or only after the art department has finalized the designs. They need to be a part of the team from the beginning, and have a real voice in product decisions. That’s what we’ve done at The Times over the past several years. Let me explain a little bit about how.
- The first step was to agree that raising the profile and status of technology at the company was something worth trying, let alone doing. Digital Tech started out small and isolated at The Times. To change that, we needed the buy-in of the business side and the Newsroom. We then set about creating the kind of vibrant tech culture you would find at a Google or Facebook rather than a traditional publisher. And we did that not by keeping technology separate from our print organization but by integrating teams across the company.
- --And speaking of technology and journalism, we built a technology team right in the Newsroom to work on interactive projects on deadline. Not that Newsroom, this newsroom.
- That team, along with our brilliant graphics department, is responsible for many of our award-winning examples of interactive journalism over the years. Having developers in the newsroom has also helped expose our journalists to the creativity of our technologists, and in turn helped our software engineers to absorb our core journalistic values, and understand more about what it means to be a reporter or editor at The Times. Here are a few examples of the things they’ve built.
- For the new products we will launched last week – most notably NYT Now, we formed dedicated, interdisciplinary teams who were able to take advantage of the common services we designed, while they built their own products on top of those platforms. Now, some of the changes we made – like the Ping Pong table – are more symbolic than substantive. And others, such as creating a team of newsroom developers, only got us part of the way there. If I had to point to one thing that has made the Times act more like a tech company than anything else it’s this:
- We stopped buying software from outside vendors whenever we wanted to do something new. Instead, we began to think about how we could build what we needed ourselves.
- Building software gives your team the experience it needs to gain capabilities and insights into your business they would not have otherwise. It can give you the critical advantage you need to differentiate from your competitors. Done right, it helps you create enduring platforms that can grow and change with your business, not inflexible one-off solutions that become obsolete by the time they are launched. Building rather than buying has also enabled us to move quickly. That’s because we have a vertically integrated solution rather than an overly complex hodgepodge of systems that don’t share data with one another. Perhaps most important, this philosophy and culture has helped us attract and retain talented software engineers, the kind of people who like to create new products and new technologies and not just integrate software that was made someplace else.
- I don’t want to make it sound like we build everything – we don’t. We actually work with many technology vendors. But we start from the premise that if the functionality is core and strategic to our business, and a way for us to differentiate ourselves in the marketplace, then we need to own it. We wouldn’t outsource our Washington bureau – why would we ever dream of outsourcing our CMS? Having a tech team well versed in software development also gives you another critical advantage: they are better positioned to successfully partner with vendors and make smart and informed technology choices.
- I’ve focused almost exclusively on technology, but there’s a related discipline that’s equally important: product management. Without great leadership on the business side, even the best tech teams will flounder. Great product managers collaborate with Technology teams to find the best solution, build or buy. They think in terms strategic capabilities, not one-off features. But if all your product managers can do is choose between Vendor A and Vendor B, then they should be working someplace else. For many years, and perhaps still, building instead of buying was a controversial stance. We are, after all inundated with pitches for new technology.
- Here’s an interesting graphic about the state of marketing technology. Yes, many companies want your business. And this slide seems to imply that if you just picked the best vendor in each category, you’d be fine. But the truth is, that’s not a technology strategy – it’s a mess. That’s because what makes all of these products useful is data – your data, which you need to own. You also need to be able to interpret it, and act on the insights. And to do that you need systems that share information, not lock it away in silos. You can’t innovate if you are dependent upon a jigsaw puzzle of disparate systems that may or may not fit together.
- Over the past couple of years, we’ve made a huge investment in analytics and business intelligence. We’ve built technology to track our users across all of our products. We’ve also invested in data science, and recently hired our first chief data scientist so that we can begin to figure out how to become a more data driven organization. And finally, we are changing yet again. Later this year we will move to a new software and product development methodology called Continuous Delivery.
- CD, as it’s known, standardizes and automates many functions and tasks in the software development lifecycle. Companies that have adopted it such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google, have seen dramatic improvements in the speed of new product development and in the quality of the software they release. I often get asked this age-old question about what keeps me up at night. Recently someone sent me an email offering a few specifics. It went something like this: What business/strategic problems/challenges are you trying to solve for -- automation/audience buying trends in advertising, deeper insights/data, pace of publishing/speed to market, innovation, multi-device/social/distributed environments, user behavior, legacy systems/organization/processes, etc.
- The answer is yes, all of the above. The demands on all technology organizations are growing rapidly. At The Times, we are always trying to balance the hunger of our business and newsroom for new products and innovation with our capacity to get things done. If anything, that insatiable demand has compelled us to move even faster to adopt cloud technologies and continuous delivery. And it’s also made everyone on my team redouble their efforts to help business people, journalists, designers and engineers learn how to collaborate more effectively. There’s no way you solve any of the problems we face without putting technology front and center in your organization. That’s why I believe we are all technology companies now: You can’t innovate unless you build the capabilities of your technology team until they are as good if not better than your newsroom, your ad sales department, your marketing department – whatever your company believes it is best at. Technology has to be that good. Otherwise, you’ll always be at a competitive disadvantage to the companies where it is.
- Thank you.