A Thought About Company Boards
And here it is: they need me.
OK, alright, I'm an egotistical, self-absorbed maniac. But consider this: IT and security have over the past two decades been elevated to a business-critical role in most companies.
Problem: most boards have little to no understanding of technology at a business operations, or indeed, any level.
Why this matters: there are an awful lot of bad CIO's out there.
IT takes a major chunk of operating budgets everywhere. A good executive IT leader can drive fantastic improvements in the bottom-line by utilizing those budgets effectively. Hands up now, how many of you believe you have one in your organization?
And some of these investments are, like my son likes to say, Ghigormous. Yet when that same leader speaks to the board, normally their presentation cannot be properly evaluated or challenged.
And doing so requires more than technology OR industry expertise. It requires those, of course, and at a pretty deep level. But it also requires a true understanding about IT in business operations. In other words, how and why and in what context does any particular initiative make sense from a business perspective, NOT a technology perspective. Of course, the presentations include these elements. But technology is a specialized field, security is even more so, and thus it is extremely easy to bury a number of favorable hidden assumptions in any board-level IT presentation so as to drive a favorable decision. That is, if that's your CIO is up to.
Guess what? I'm really-good(tm) at this process. Shoot, I've helped some of these folks successfully make their pitches. So I can provide good value to a board. Private equity has this figured out; they have certain folks doing that for their turnaround targets. Why not the rest?
(and no, it's not just about me, but hey, if it gets attention...)
OK, alright, I'm an egotistical, self-absorbed maniac. But consider this: IT and security have over the past two decades been elevated to a business-critical role in most companies.
Problem: most boards have little to no understanding of technology at a business operations, or indeed, any level.
Why this matters: there are an awful lot of bad CIO's out there.
IT takes a major chunk of operating budgets everywhere. A good executive IT leader can drive fantastic improvements in the bottom-line by utilizing those budgets effectively. Hands up now, how many of you believe you have one in your organization?
And some of these investments are, like my son likes to say, Ghigormous. Yet when that same leader speaks to the board, normally their presentation cannot be properly evaluated or challenged.
And doing so requires more than technology OR industry expertise. It requires those, of course, and at a pretty deep level. But it also requires a true understanding about IT in business operations. In other words, how and why and in what context does any particular initiative make sense from a business perspective, NOT a technology perspective. Of course, the presentations include these elements. But technology is a specialized field, security is even more so, and thus it is extremely easy to bury a number of favorable hidden assumptions in any board-level IT presentation so as to drive a favorable decision. That is, if that's your CIO is up to.
Guess what? I'm really-good(tm) at this process. Shoot, I've helped some of these folks successfully make their pitches. So I can provide good value to a board. Private equity has this figured out; they have certain folks doing that for their turnaround targets. Why not the rest?
(and no, it's not just about me, but hey, if it gets attention...)
posted by Blinkered at 7:56 AM
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