Dive Brief:

• New York Times CIO Cindy Taibi prioritizes technology availability; with a 24/7 news cycle, there are no longer clear windows where the company can schedule downtime or maintenance, she said while speaking at the Gartner Symposium in Orlando, Florida on Wednesday. 

• When she took over as CIO six months ago, one of the first things Taibi implemented was a team for enterprise productivity to help the organization move more collectively with the agile methodology. She has teams using the objective and key results (OKR) and directly responsible individual (DRI) models. 

• The company enables its global staff with the support of the cloud. It eliminated all five of its data centers and uses AWS and Google as its preferred cloud providers, Taibi said. The Times uses the elasticity cloud providers offer instead of having to architect its technology for peak season, which hits every four years on presidential election day.

Dive Insight:

The NYT began its digital transformation in 1996 after launching its website, which began the shift from traditional print publishing model to a digital one.  

Publishing began to revolve around online sites and a 24 hours news cycle, which became a "downstream process," said Taibi. When the news outlet shifted to running constantly, there were operational and cultural changes in its technical paradigm. 

At the helm of the news company's technology — drawing on 37 years of experience in technology at The New York Times — Taibi has to navigate a rapidly changing tech landscape supporting the constant news cycle while also meeting business operations demands. 

Now, The Times uses G Suite and Slack for content sharing and communication, but Taibi said there is a challenge with siloed tools. Digital dexterity can be an issue and one of the ways she is working to resolve it is by uncovering where tools are being used. CIOs frequently run into issues of too many employees using unregulated tools without protection agreements.

The organization's methods have evolved over the last two years since migrating to the cloud and Taibi is focused on optimization. Today's needs are different and reevaluate data efficiency, cost and "revisit continuity plans that were different when we were on-premise," she said.