CTO · Oil, gas & mining · Buenos Aires
The CTO is no longer a support role
Technology leadership for operators, gas marketers and miners that make calls on data, software and models every week: what to build, what to buy, what to hand to a model, and who does the work.
The thesis
Building got cheap. Choosing didn't
Inside an operator, technology landed on the support side: systems, networks, licenses. The actual technical work runs on another track: the subsurface in Petrel, production in spreadsheets, marketing over email, each island inherited rather than chosen.
With today's models, an internal tool takes days to build. What didn't get cheaper is judgment: which question is worth answering, which task goes to a model and which doesn't, how the work gets reorganized once building stops being the bottleneck.
Those decisions call for someone who comes from the work being transformed, with years inside subsurface, operations and commercial.
The role
Four decisions with an owner
How the work gets done
What gets automated, what goes to a model and what stays manual, revisited as the models change.
Which technology
What to buy, what to build and what to retire: subsurface software, data, agents, and the infrastructure that lets them coexist.
Who does it
Which profiles to hire, what to outsource, and when a per-project specialist beats a permanent seat.
When it gets revisited
A technology call doesn't stay made: model prices move, the business moves, and the choice gets another look. That is what the role needs continuity for.
The fraction
The right size for the role
A small or mid-size operator, a gas marketer, a junior miner or a new energy company can't fill a full-time CTO who also knows the domain. The decisions show up anyway, every week. The fractional role is not the trimmed-down version of the seat: it is its right size, on fixed hours per month, available when a decision can't wait. When the work needs more hands, a team gets assembled per project, with specialists for the case.
The demonstration
The tools on this site came out of that loop
Each one started with a business question, went through the technology picked to answer it, and ended with the work organized so one person could ship it: basin activity ahead of the official registry, the unified mining cadastre, the gas transport grid segment by segment, the sector's cyber incident register. The least visible part of the judgment, deciding which task a model can carry and which it can't, is published too: the interpretability research.
The limit
What it is not
It is not IT management: support, networks and the ERP stay where they are. It is not a software factory: when something needs building at scale, a team gets assembled for the case and the role directs it from the client's side. And it doesn't arrive with the answer pre-made: a good share of these decisions, taken well, end in building nothing.
Contact
The first conversation
Twenty minutes on the technology decisions ahead, and which fraction of the role covers them.
matias@podeley.ar · Buenos Aires