Scott Donaldson, Stanley Siegel and Gary Donaldson interview many of the world's most influential chief technology officers in CTOs at Work, offering a brand-new companion volume to the highly acclaimed bestseller Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston and Peter Seibel's best-selling Coders at Work, both from Apress. As the words at work suggest, the authors focus on how their interviewees tackle the day-to-day work of the CTO while revealing much more: how they got there, how they manage and allocate projects, and how they interact with business units and ensure that their companies take advantage of technologies, teamwork, and software development practices to respond to organizational needs and improve employee productivity. Surveying a variety of unique corporations, CTOs at Work offers insights into the present and future of CTOs in organizations around the world.What you'll learn * How many chief technical officers from the world's leading corporations do their job, and the skills they consider most essential for carrying out their work effectively * Interesting applications of technology and software development used to increase productivity or profitability in today's leading organizations * The technology- and business-related challenges and opportunities that CTOs foresee in years to come Who this book is for Anyone interested in how a CTO views the use of technologies in an organization and leads its software development initiatives. This book is especially useful for managers, developers, and IT personnel charged with using automation to increase productivity. Indeed, it's not just for aspiring CTOs, but also for project managers, software engineers, and application developers who want a better understanding of the strategies their senior IT executives employ to make their organizations as productive and competitive as possible. Table of Contents * SAIC * CA Technologies * Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory * Polar Star Consulting * BPL Global * NPR * Mind Over Machines * Gartner, Inc.* Springer * TinEye/Idee * MAPA Group * Johnson & Johnson, Vertex Pharmaceuticals * Gerson Lehrman Group

The objective of APM Best Practices: Realizing Application Performance Management is to establish reliable application performance management (APM) practices-to demonstrate value, to do it quickly, and to adapt to the client circumstances. It's important to balance long-term goals with short-term deliverables, but without compromising usefulness or correctness. The successful strategy is to establish a few reasonable goals, achieve them quickly, and then iterate over the same topics two more times, with each successive iteration expanding the skills and capabilities of the APM team. This strategy is referred to as "Good, Better, Best". The application performance monitoring marketplace is very focused on ease of installation, rapid time to usefulness, and overall ease of use. But these worthy platitudes do not really address the application performance management processes that ensure that you will deploy effectively, synergize on quality assurance test plans, triage accurately, and encourage collaboration across the application life cycle that ultimately lowers overall application cost and ensures a quality user experience. These are also fine platitudes but these are the ones that are of interest to your application sponsors. These are the ones for which you need to show value. This CA Press book employs this iterative approach, adapted pragmatically for the realities of your organizational and operational constraints, to realize a future state that your sponsors will find useful, predictable and manageable-and something that they will want to fund. In the meantime, you will learn the useful techniques needed to set up and maintain a useful performance management system utilizing best practices regardless of the software provider(s).