A financial news CTO explains his job

Martin Bryan of TheNextWeb.com interviewed John O’Donovan, the chief technology officer of The Financial Times, about his job.

Here is an excerpt:

Anything else you can tell us about what you’re working on?

Our editorial team are continually exploring different ways to tell a story using data, providing a richer level of analysis by proving it or disproving it with data, interactive or graphics. We second some of our front-end developers from the IT department to the newsroom, allowing us to support our editorial skillset.

Community and social is of course an area we want to do more in. The FT uses social media to build communities and deeper relationship with readers, for example using Facebook to ask followers in Brazil what they thought would stop the protests there and selecting some of their answers for use on ft.com. We encourage readers to connect with our content and our journalists to reply to readers comments. We run polls on ft.com, host Twitter chats and choose readers’ comments to appear in a dedicated box on the ft.com homepage.

Technically we are investing in hybrid models for using cloud in a sensible and sustainable way. I’ve used a lot of cloud services and am now into a mature phase of looking at what works best in a way that spans the infrastructure options available. It is still an immature market.

There are also some exciting opportunities in working closer with (FT parent company) Pearson which are playing to the strengths of both brands.

Read more here.