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.

The IT Chauffeur drives to CIO Canada

In the June issue of Canadian CIO, editor Shane Schick interviews me about The IT Chauffeur.  I enjoyed having a chance to talk about what inspired me to write the book: the disconnect between CxOs and IT.

Here's the interview in the June issue of Canadian CIO: IT strategy, he wrote

Canadian CIO June 2013

What do you think the CEO should know about IT?

Have you ever wondered why there is a disconnect between IT and business in many organizations? Does it start at the top?  

Regardless of your position in any organization, can you explain how IT decisions get made?

Some business articles allude to a poor relationship between IT and other departments being a function of poor management.  Would this gap disappear if the C-suite had a better understanding of Information Technology?

What do you think the CEO or anyone at the C-suite should know about IT?  Here are my top items: 

• Clear understanding of how IT decisions should get made
• IT Governance
• How to integrate business and IT
• How to use the business case in IT and other divisions
• How project management methodologies for all divisions can make an organization more effective
• How data integrity is critical to the operation of the organization
• How to make the IT department's services efficient
• How to protect the organization from natural and man-made disasters 
• Why it's important to protect data
• Fundamental understanding of the cloud
• Basic understanding of big data and business intelligence
• Know that IT can be socially conscientious with green IT, and finally,
• How to undertake the development of an IT strategy

Recognizing that CxOs often don't understand IT as a starting point, I wanted to explore what the CxO should know about IT using a non-technical, easy-to-understand, conversational story. So have a read of the book The IT Chauffeur (Available at Amazon.com or at CreateSpace).