Posts from Chief technology officer

The Green Button

Green buttonThis past Sunday afternoon I had the pleasure of being on the judges panel at the NYC Cleanweb Hackathon at NYU ITP. There were thirteen hacks presented to the judges. Of them, probably half had incorporated the "green button" for getting your utility data into their app.

The Green Button is an initiative promoted by Aneesh Chopra, the CTO of the United States. In a speech last fall, he challenged the utility industry to come up with a simple way to allow consumers to access their utility data. Last week, three big California utilities announced they had made the Green Button available on their websites.

And by sunday, the green button was in a half a dozen web and mobile apps that had been created over the weekend. This is the kind of innovation that gets me excited. The Green Button is like OAuth for energy data. It is a simple standard that the utlities can implement on one side and web/mobile deveopers can implement on the other side. And the result is a ton of information sharing about energy consumption and in all liklihood energy savings that result from more informed consumers.

The Green Button follows on the success of the Blue Button, a similar initiative that allows veterans to get at their medical data.

I'm a big fan of simplicity and open standards to unleash a lot of innovation. APIs and open data aren't always simple concepts for end users. Green Buttons and Blue Buttons are pretty simple concepts that most consumers will understand. I'm hoping we soon see Yellow Buttons, Red Buttons, Purple Buttons, and Orange Buttons too.

Let's get behind these open data initiatives. Let's build them into our apps. And let's pressure our hospitals, utilities, and other institutions to support them. I'm going to reach out to ConEd, the utility in NYC, and find out when they are going to add Green Button support to their consumers data. I hope it is soon.

#Web/Tech

VP Engineering Vs CTO

Last week on MBA Mondays I posted about the difference between CFO and VP Finance. In the comments to that post, I was asked about VP Eng vs CTO and I figured that had the makings of a good post too. So here we go.

Like VP Finance & CFO, the differences in the two positions are not just about seniority. In fact, in the case of CTO and VP Eng, seniority is often a non-factor. They are often peers. A VP Eng can report to a CTO. And a CTO can report to a VP Eng (although this last one is less frequent).

A VP Engineering is ideally a great manager and a great team builder. He or she will be an excellent recruiter, a great communicator, and a great issue resolver. The VP Eng's job is to make everyone in the engineering organization successful and he or she needs to fix the issues that are getting in the way of success.

A CTO is ideally the strongest technologist in the organization. He or she will be an architect, a thinker, a researcher, a tester and a tinkerer. The CTO is often the technical co-founder if there is one (and you know I think there must be one).

When a company has a strong CTO and a strong VP Engineering that trust, respect, and like each other, you have a winning formula. The CTO makes sure the technical approach is correct and the VP Engineering makes sure the team is correct. They are yin and yang.

Startup companies in their earliest stages will have neither position. The ideal web/mobile startup will have a CEO/founder who will also wear the VP Product hat. It will have a technical co-founder who will wear both the CTO and VP Eng hats. And it will have a few more engineers. And maybe a community manager.

But as the startup grows and the engineering team needs a layer of management, these two roles come into play. If the technical co-founder is a great manager/leader, they will naturally migrate into the VP Engineering role and eventually seek to hire a CTO or promote a CTO from within. But it is more common for the technical co-founder to migrate into the CTO position and seek to hire a VP Engineering to run the engineering team on a day to day basis. Either model works. It just depends on the skills and personality of the team that is in place.

It is very rare to find a person who can do both the VP Eng and CTO jobs at the same time. They require very different skills and very different time allocations. I've seen it work a few times, but it is the exception that proves the rule in my mind.

#MBA Mondays