Chad Dickerson

During the past several weeks, it has been difficult to ignore the dark cloud of endless corporate scandals hanging over American business.

In the daily life of a CTO, communication skills come into play in all kinds of situations. In a typical day, the CTO deals with bosses, employees and customers. Although all of these interactions operate on a common foundation, the nuances in these interactions can be quite different.

Despite all the attention given to CTOs who design and build new and innovative systems for their companies, a lot of what a CTO does these days is look at existing infrastructure and decide what can be removed from service without harming the business.

InfoWorld (US) columnist Chad Dickerson