The CEO of Technology by Hunter Muller

Author:Hunter Muller
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781119276357
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2018-01-16T11:39:42+00:00

Chapter 5

Elevation and Career Ascent

Contributing Value to the Board

As business continues to become technology-driven, CIOs and IT executives are increasingly expanding their roles beyond the C-suite.

Their experience and expertise is sorely needed at the board level. According to a 2016 study conducted by Accenture, just 10 percent of board members on corporate boards have professional technology experience.

There's tremendous value that CIOs can offer to boards by illuminating them on critical technology trends couched in business terms.

“Board-ready CIOs are business leaders first with the strongest technology backbones possible,” says Adriana Karaboutis, now former EVP Technology, Business Solutions & Corporate Affairs at Biogen. Adriana is on the board of Advance Auto Parts and Perrigo plc, both public companies, and Biogen and Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Massachusetts (not-for-profit). She recently joined National Grid pc as chief information and digital officer.

She says the first thing that boards look for from CIOs is the ability to speak clearly about technology issues in business terms. This includes the capacity to explain the advantages and benefits of different classes of digital technologies, such as social, mobile, analytics, cloud, and IoT, in understandable terms. Equally, CIOs on boards help delineate the most critical topic and risk consuming boards today: cybersecurity.

Given the escalating risks posed by cybersecurity attacks, boards also expect CIOs to keep them apprised of emerging cybersecurity challenges and risk mitigation strategies. One way of doing this is by communicating to the board examples of cyberattacks that have been launched against other companies recently, along with the impact that these attacks have had on operational uptime, margins, customer loyalty, and so on.

Another way that CIOs can demonstrate their value to the board is by communicating the returns generated by investing in data and analytics. This can include educating the board about how the use of market and customer data with analytics can be used to unearth insights into the factors that are contributing to recent changes in profit margins or customer satisfaction, along with actions that have been taken to address specific business challenges and the results that have been achieved.

In working with the C-suite and the board, it's critical for CIOs to be effective communicators and great storytellers in order to effectively express what they're trying to impart.

“I believe future CIOs and future leaders have to be technologists with technical depth and breadth that have deep business domain so they understand the business that they're in, and they can convey the art of the possible,” says Snehal Antani, CTO at Splunk, in an HMG Strategy video. “This means that they're great storytellers, and they can tell stories to the board which may not necessarily be tech-savvy.”

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