Tick off your Distress! Know the Key Challenges CTOs Face

“We are hiring CTO!”

When you see this statement in today’s time, dig down into the finer details to see how much the scope of work has evolved than what the CTOs in 2018 were doing. Although technology has simplified many areas, the lack of it and the resistance to adopting it has put companies backwards from their true potential.

Even after putting your best foot forward if you fall short of your goals, it’s time to look under the carpet for the issue and key challenges CTOs face. In this blog, you will find key challenges CTOs face and ways to solve them.

CTOs Find it Difficult to Deploy Quality Software At Scale

If you are heading a technical team, you will be able to relate. When the focus is on a single software, you can attribute it to the highest quality known to your software developers. However, complexity sets in once you are engulfed with multiple software requirements–each of different shapes and sizes.

Talking from our personal experience, even as we grew from a small pool of clients to being a global IT company, we did some trial and error with our software development processes. The obvious solution many CTOs can think of is to expand their teams. However, with a bigger team comes bigger challenges. And, the chase to quality software development becomes the journey to a mirage.

The solution to deploying multiple high-quality software should be relevant irrespective of team size, project count, project specifications, and time, which turns out to be key challenges CTOs face to find.

Potential Solutions:

• Opt for an agile software development process to reduce the rework ratio and get more done in less time.
• If your facility and infrastructure allow, expand your team with tech talents of multiple skill sets to work on multiple projects.
• Set a definite software development process with better clarity over requirements and execution process.

Best Solution:

Speed and accuracy can coexist with the right approach. Adopt DevOps for completely collaborating your software development functions using your IT operations for your software development team to develop, test, and release new software efficiently and with speed.

Benefits of Adopting DevOps:

• Underpins the development of microservices
• Easy deployment along with scalability with cloud-based infrastructure.
• Automated testing with real users in production environment.

Staying on the Horizon for Adoption of New Technologies

If you are heading a technical team, you will be able to relate. When the focus is on a single software, you can attribute it to the highest quality known to your software developers. However, complexity sets in once you are engulfed with multiple software requirements–each of different shapes and sizes.

Talking from our personal experience, even as we grew from a small pool of clients to being a global IT company, we did some trial and error with our software development processes. The obvious solution many CTOs can think of is to expand their teams. However, with a bigger team comes bigger challenges. And, the chase to quality software development becomes the journey to a mirage.

The solution to deploying multiple high-quality software should be relevant irrespective of team size, project count, project specifications, and time, which turns out to be key challenges CTOs face to find.

Potential Solutions:

• Follow the trends of your industry’s giant. Since they’d have a good research and development team, you might end up being at the forefront of the trend.
• Set up your own R&D team with technology experts to help you check the sustainability and usability specific to your company.
• Let the buzz pertaining to a technology settle down a bit and then you can decide after having multiple opinions floating around it.

Best Solution:

Ever heard about the ‘divide and conquer’ rule? With so many sources to gain technical information from, it might be overwhelming to filter out useful knowledge for your business success. In such a case, you can encourage your team to do their research on their own and share useful insights within a shared space to identify the important technologies for your company.

Imbalance in Business-Technology Goals

CTOs with visionary thinking always look at technology as an instrument to add to their success toolkit. If you are also from the same pool of CTOs, you might see synchronizing the technology solutions with your business goals as challenging.

In most cases, technology is seen as secondary to business, which is the primary reason for the disproportion between them. In reality, it is important to strike a balance between business objectives and technology. You can resolve one of these key challenges CTOs face to achieve this balance with the help of technical literacy, strategical agility, and a clear business vision.

Potential Solutions:

• Take a note of the early signs of imbalance. For example, you might have spent too much time and effort on your business strategy and too little on technology. Once you identify such gaps, try to incorporate technology into your business strategies powered with automation to cut down on manual operations.
• Empower your team with digital literacy. When your team is to encounter new technology, conduct knowledge sharing sessions to educate them with details about it and let them explore it on their own as well.
• Know how your business did, is doing, and might do in the future. Once you identify your business’ growth track, see how you can use technology to leave better trails than projected.

Best Solution:

Get an opinion from a reliable technological expert. While carrying out your research is a great homework you can do for your company, taking help from someone working day-in and day-out on technology will bear good results.

Difficulty in Identifying New Monetization Strategies

As per data by Business of Apps, Google Play Store has about 95% of free apps while the App Store consists of 90% of free apps. While revenue through ads remains one of the most popular app monetization strategies, there are some apps that can do away without it with another better revenue generation strategy.

Finding a viable and sustainable app monetization method for your business can take a shorter duration to profitability. However, one of the key challenges CTOs face is to find an ideal strategy.

Potential Solutions:

• Begin with a free version of the application and measure the performance. Track the most-used feature/functionality within the app and monetize that with a justifiable revenue plan.
• Have more than one app monetization way–one primary and other secondaries. As a result, when one strategy doesn’t work, you always have another one working for you.
• When you see the subscription model failing for your application even after launching and marketing your app well, you can use revenue through ads and make the app free to use for some time till your users get a taste of what you are serving.

Best Solution:

Consult your app development agency for the best monetization strategy suitable for your application. If you have had an in-house team working on your application, you can look up a reliable software development agency and ask your queries about the monetization strategy for your app.

Manual Security Detection Process and Delayed Response

When an organization begins to grow, the first step it takes is to develop its security capabilities. There are multiple open passages through which cybercriminals can sweep into your system and conduct data breaches. With a manual security detection process, it might become difficult for your team to analyze each and every use case.

Also, when a breach has already occurred, your team might have to see through the entire system and your response to security threats might be delayed, compromising more data, which is one of the key challenges CTOs face.

Potential Solutions:

• You can document your security policies with the knowledge repository for your employees and team to understand the entire process to kill the possibility of a security breach.
• Keep a close track of your user activity for identifying suspicious activities such as user impersonation and privilege abuse.
• Limit the privilege of users to their roles and jobs to avoid exposure to data.

Best Solution:

Incorporate automation for security threat identification to be on top of your system’s privacy and avoid worsening the state of breached security by implementing a prompt response.

Getting Over the App Fatigue

Given the influence of the information bombarding, the attention of users is getting narrower and narrower. As a result, CTOs have to be extremely careful about the idea of their application and how they are going to proceed with their app to curb futuristic challenges.

One of the key challenges CTOs face with the app business is app fatigue. When your users do not find your application useful in comparison with the other applications available in the market, you begin losing a number of downloads, users, and revenue share.

Potential Solutions:

• Experiment with new technologies such as AR/VR, AI, IoT, etc. to keep your users glued to your application.
• Personalization goes a long way. When your users have to do the least possible efforts to get their ambition accomplished, the chances of them staying on the app increase.
• Look for any kind of performance issues with your application and optimize it.

Best Solution:

Take a close look at your application’s performance in the Google Play Store and App Store and identify what your user sentiments are. In addition to this, you can even find their feedback and understand the gaps you can cover to keep the user interaction up and running.

Protecting Data in a Flexible Work Environment

Before the word Covid-19 began to be a normal word in the vocabulary, data protection within a work environment wasn’t much of an issue. However, with work from home being the new normal and blending in as a hybrid working model, the data is all over the place.

As a result, CTOs have this additional work to change their current cybersecurity model with a new paradigm. Another challenge that CTOs face is regarding the use of personal systems by employees. While most companies offer laptops and systems for work, there are independent employees, contractors, etc. who work using their own system. This scattered and global workspace has added another layer of data security, which is one of the key challenges CTOs face.

Potential Solutions:

• Offering training to employees and carry out security drills to train them to stay on top of data security.
• Create policies about specific goals and limit roles around the job of your employees to avoid data exposure.
• Have your team sign an NDA as well as service agreements to ensure the highest grade of security enforcement.

Best Solution:

Adopt cloud-oriented solutions and set roles and permissions to enable only restricted access to users. Hence, you know that a user not involved in a particular process does not have any access to your data.

Behind the CTOs Role

In some companies, CTOs are only limited to technical roles. However, without understanding business strategies and objectives, it is difficult to focus on the technical objectives. As a result, it won’t be extreme to say that technology is modifying the business rules, right from processes to outcomes and even the measurement of performance.

Now that the CTOs role has been redefined, there’s more work to do than before. And this work isn’t a desk job. But the brainstorming part. However, with this increased scope of work, even the support has been extended in the form of ODCs and technical consultation agencies.

So, if you are in the deep waters and find it difficult to swim, just look for a boat!