Monday 26 August 2013

IT Matters


Boards naturally expect management to optimize IT efficiency and deliver projects on time and on budget. But sometimes the CEO and the senior management team don’t have IT knowledge or experience. Their comfort level - and knowledge - is limited, so they will abdicate IT governance to the CIO, CFO or IT Director.

Why? Sometimes the CEO really doesn’t understand the technical aspects of IT, and secondly, many CEOs trust their staff completely in this area.

How IT decisions get made should not be about trust; it is more about teamwork, and executives and board members need to be part of the team.

So why aren’t they?
 
A lot of reasons. Executives and boards haven’t involved themselves in IT governance because they think IT requires more technical insight in order to understand how it can help the company. Or they see IT as too complex. Or IT has been set up within the organization as a department separate from the business itself. Whatever the reasons, organizations really should not let ‘technical literacy’ be a roadblock, good IT oversight requires governance skills, not technical skills.

Many CEOs tend to be in that boat where they’ve delegated the technology oversight to their CIO or CFO mainly because I don’t feel technically up to speed. After all, they’re the experts. The CEO thinks he/she doesn’t have to be, and many CEOs don’t plan to spend the time to get technical.

The reality is you don’t need to be technical to understand IT governance. It is a governance process, and Board members and CEOs certainly understand governance. CIOs still deal with all the technical aspects, but good governance focuses on the business, creating integration of business and IT and creating value. Boards and CEOs need to get involved because IT does matter.