Name: Mitchell Ashley
Title/Employer: CTO and General Manager, StillSecure
Age: 46
Education: BS Computer Science and Business Administration, University of Nebraska, Kearney
Tenure In IT industry: 24 years
First Tech Job: I started my own company, Softform Software, while in college. I was developing software for doctors' offices as well as consulting for the Nebraska Department of Education.
Current role: As CTO and General Manager, I have a broad mix of responsibilities including company and product strategy, product direction, sales, marketing, customer experience, new product development and market introduction, product P&L, and serving as company spokesperson for the media and analyst communities. Essentially, my job is to clearly communicate our goals, and then work with my team members to help them be successful.
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What's been your best job and why?
It is hard to choose because I've enjoyed all of my jobs and the companies where I have worked. There are two that standout for me. The first is when I led my first high performance team as Manager of Advanced Technology Projects at EDS. The other is my current position at StillSecure where I have a hand in virtually all aspects of the company. Here I also lead a high performance team that is introducing our revolutionary secure network infrastructure product, the Cobia Unified Network Platform.
What do you think is the number one non-IT skill IT professionals need today?
There are two: business knowledge and communications skills. If you understand the business (not just the workings of it but the fundamentals behind it) you can align yourself and the organization to develop much better software, networks, products, and services. If you communicate your ideas as well as how what you are working on benefits the business, you have a much greater opportunity to influence others both internally and externally.
What do you credit your career success to?
I credit my success to an unquenchable thirst for learning and desire to surround myself with a lot of talented people. Whenever I am able to foster creation of a shared vision amongst a team of highly competent and passionate individuals, even the most difficult challenges can be overcome and amazing results are achieved by everyone. These are the career moments that make me the proudest.
What are the top three skills a high-level IT manager needs today?
1) Learn the business and domain that you are managing. I am not a believer in the philosophy that good managers can manage anything. I believe good managers can manage things they know or learn. Ask any successful CEO whether they only applied their existing domain knowledge to the business or whether they learned everything about the business while applying existing expertise to the job. All of us need to do the same thing.
2) Clearly align what your organization does with what the business does. If you cannot draw a clear connection between the efforts of your team and benefits to the company, then you are going to have an uphill battle with funding, direction, perceived value, and morale. Non-IT leaders highly value IT managers and leaders who can easily communicate and demonstrate how what they do aligns with the business. Employees in the organization also put more value on their work because they know the company values their efforts.
3) Break down walls and barriers; inside and outside the organization. Small companies are about the individual personalities where as large companies are about organizations and politics. If IT leadership fosters politics and organizational infighting, no one stands a chance of working together. If IT leadership demonstrates an intolerance for politics and barriers, they are less likely to develop.
What's your favorite IT resource site and why?
Google and Google alerts. Because of the topics I follow, I visit every site that interests me on a daily basis versus just a few one-off sites. Those topics evolve and change and so do my Google alerts. My web browser homepage is Google.
What is the best career advice you've ever received?
The most important thing to learn in school is how to learn. Everything else you learn about IT will be outdated in six months.
What's the top advice you'd give to a new IT staffer?
Software is about "systems", not about code. Software operates in an ecosystem of operating systems, file systems, data storage, internal and external networks, end user experiences, servers, security devices many things. The more you pour yourself into understanding all of these, the better the IT person you will be, no matter what aspect of IT is your focus.
What would you advise someone looking to find the type of role you currently have?
To be a CTO you have to be able to think systemically, as I described in the "top advice to a new IT staffer" section. But more than just technology, you must understand the businesses, customers, competition, and markets in which you operate. The best technologist is a research scientist, not a CTO. CTOs have to connect the dots between business objectives, products and services of the organization, the current and future capabilities of the organization, customers' current and future needs, competitive opportunities and threats, and strategies that maximize the potential of the business.
As General Manager you must have the product management, marketing, and operations experience to lead the creation of new products, bring them to market, and build a revenue pipeline to maximize the investment. Technical skills are an added bonus but this aspect of the job is about business, marketing, and finance, and working with every part of the organization to achieve our shared goals.
What is the one career decision you would change if you could?
Start all of my companies in the early 1990s and sell all of them before 2000. Seriously, I learned just as much from companies and products that didn't make it as the ones that were highly successful from a financial standpoint. I wouldn't change any career decision I've made, except perhaps to leave the larger companies I worked at sooner than I did so I could start up new companies.
If you had the choice to jump into any other job, tech or non-tech, what would it be?
Some days I think how great it would be to be back in there designing and building software with my teams, and other days I think about the possibility of being CEO of a company. The more I learn about finance and business, the more I realize I would enjoy being a CEO. Make no mistake about it, being CTO and General Manager is the best of both worlds. I have the best job in the company, and today it would be hard to trade it for any other.
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