Bryson Koehler, executive vice president, CIO and CTO of The Weather Company, answers a few questions about how the speed and pace technology today is affecting the new CIO role.
"I tell my team all the time, if you want to rack servers and pull cables, than we should go get you a job at a hosting company somewhere. If you want to assemble great technology tools and provide capabilities to our product team so that they can go build great things, then this is the place for you.
And that's a very different mindset than even say five years ago, especially at the Weather Company."
Watch the video or read the transcript below.
"Weather forecasting was the first computer application ever coded, 25,000 punch cards on ENIAC and ever since then everybody's been trying to figure out how to predict the weather with more accuracy to help keep people safe and protect property.
So I'm just fascinated by that challenge and trying to find ways to use data in computing power to make the world a better place.
Today what worries me most is is how fast the movement from web to mobile is occurring.
From a consumer perspective, the eyeballs that were traditionally going to web properties, are now going to mobile properties. It is happening much faster than I think anybody had really predicted.
Everybody knew it was gonna happen, we're all expecting it to happen, but the tools, the technology, the way we monetize, the way we advertise, the way that we provide analytics, the way that we build applications, the way that we visualize data, in our case weather data, on mobile devices, you know, we have a lot of work to do, just as the entire industry does. And the pace in the speed of change from web to mobile is just happening so much faster, years faster than we thought it would.
Technology at the end of the day is not the point of my job, technology is what enables me to do my job.
And my job is to enable our business to build and do great things, to provide great products and services.
As I look kinda to the future from a CIO perspective, that enterprising aspect is dead-on, and our role has to change. For me, my role has completely changed already, but I recognize many companies are in different stages of that transformation.
I tell my team all the time, if you want to rack servers and pull cables, than we should go get you a job at a hosting company somewhere. If you want to assemble great technology tools and provide capabilities to our product team so that they can go build great things, then this is the place for you.
And that's a very different mindset than even say five years ago, especially at the Weather Company."
Bryson Koehler is executive vice president and CIO of The Weather Company. He is responsible for setting the strategic vision, financial planning, technical operations, direction and execution of strategic technology initiatives for the company. In the past, Bryson has worked as an operating partner in private equity and as SVP of global revenue and guest technology at InterContinental Hotels Group.
