The show must grow on

AS TECHNOLOGY becomes less about data processing and more about enabling communication and information delivery — whether it’s headline news or a Webcast to your shareholders — most companies are now accidental media outlets. This is forcing CTOs to reckon with the same issues traditionally found in the entertainment and media industries.

Although technologists in the media and entertainment industries have been working with digital images and video since their inception, only in the past couple of years have most CTOs had to deal with rich media. Gartner says that enterprises will want to manage rich media by 2004, but it’s already happening because many CTOs have become de facto media company CTOs.

The lessons CTOs learn building Internet-based applications and rich media for a mass audience can be applied throughout the enterprise. From personal experience, I know that the time I spent building applications for a massive media sports Web site taught me more about scale than running benchmarks ever could. You can’t replicate the effect of 180,000 hits per minute on your server farm during the NCAA basketball tournament until you’re in the middle of it. And when you are in the middle of it, the sink-or-swim nature of the experience teaches you to think and to act quickly.

As they say in show business, the show must go on. And as IT delivers more of the infrastructure for business communication, the CTO’s role as orchestrator is increasingly critical. Whether the “show” is a streaming video news feed from Afghanistan on CNN or a Webcast auction from DoveBid, many of the IT requirements are essentially the same: thorough capacity planning, near-100 percent uptime, carrier redundancy, and delivering a high-quality customer experience.

Working inside the media and entertainment industries can teach you a lot, but it’s not the only way CTOs can learn. CTO consumers should also keep their eyes open for developments in the consumer media space. Napster popularized peer-to-peer file-sharing technologies before the enterprise grew interested. Same story for IM. Weblogs have evolved from their earliest days as personal journals to effective customer communication tools for companies such as Groove Networks and Macromedia. Being a passionate computer user as a consumer can provide moments of inspiration that lead to real products. The lines between the enterprise and consumer media and entertainment realms are blurring. The technology issues I have managing my MP3 collection at home are strikingly similar to issues of managing InfoWorld content.

As the Internet grows into the preferred medium of delivery for consumer entertainment and business communication, the role of the media-savvy CTO will be increasingly crucial to the enterprise.