The board, executive team and CEO owe the CIO a dammed apology

For years many businesses have treated the IT department as a necessary evil and their investment in technology as a distress purchase. That is now coming back to bite.  Those same businesses are now looking to their CIOs to use cutting edge technology to transform their operations.

Technology and data have reshaped how people work, shop and live. So how can businesses, that have underinvested in their technology and technology teams catch up fast?

1. Give the CIO a seat and a voice at the executive table. She and the business need to see that technology matters. Make digital one of the executives top 3 agenda items, communicate this and incentive everyone in the business accordingly.  100% align the IA | RPA | AI program to the business’s broader transformation goals.
2. Teach the tech team strategy, basic finance to help understand ROI and business nomenclature.  The tech team can’t deliver if they don’t understand your language.
3. Dedicate a large percentage of your annual business budget toward hiring the best developer talent and purchase the most effective technology you can afford until you’ve caught up with other best in class companies.  
4. Create a ‘psychologically secure environment’ for your technology team to operate. Unlike what many would suggest, your business team does not need to be replaced.  It needs trained and supported. No one should fear the sack from innovating and failing fast; nor should your non-IT workers fear redundancy from technology initiatives. 
5. Align your HR, data, technology and business strategies so the right talent is available when it is needed. Build the skills you need in 18 months’ time now, not in 18 months’ time. Every employee hired should be a ‘digital bar raiser’ i.e. better than anyone in the existing team.
6. Ensure your IT team, product and sales teams all meet, and remain close to, the end customer. That way they can intimately understand the customers wants and needs and rapidly turns those into effective code. 
7. Digitise colleague and customer end user experiences using design thinking and design for digital as part of your UX toolkit. Test, check and iterate until you have created superlative technology augmented experiences.  
8. A business executive should run your IT programs and that includes planning, engaging, selling and helping deliver each technology initiative effectively. It also means owning the outcome, good or bad, and not blaming the tech team for your poor engagement or lack of understanding.
9. Spend time understanding technology and that includes working with it, horizon scanning for new tech often and helping implement technology programs that matter.
10. Recognise digital transformation is a pursuit not a project.  There is no end date. Digital is a new way of working and creating value.
11. Streamline, redesign, standardise legacy processes and only then digitise and automate.
12. Automate or you won’t scale digitally.  There is simply not enough technology talent or hours in the day to complete the volume of work required to grow a digital business without automation.
13. Ensure all your teams deliver in an Agile manner not just your IT team.  Technology is a team sport, you win, or lose together.
14. Recognise that failure is the tax on innovation.  Celebrate wins and equally celebrate the losses as opportunities to learn and grow. Share test and learn results across the entire organisation to help everyone develop. 
15. Introduce a citizen innovator program and have everyone contribute effective ideas, code and content to help digitally transform the business. Digital transformation involves everyone.
16. Put cloud at the centre of your business plans. Master the economics of cloud and target those business areas that can best benefit from it speed, flexibility, and scale advantages.
17. Create a people centre culture, as people transform businesses not technology. 
18. Build with cyber security and resilience by design. CISOs help your organisation scale fast by helping you build securely from day zero
19. Recognise that change management is an essential component of change strategy be it technological driven or otherwise.  Over communicate, never under communicate.
20. Deliver actionable insight into the hands of everyone who needs it.  Data initiatives and data quality should meet excellent, risk-based quality standards.  Identify what teams and decisions would most benefit from excellent insight. Then put systems in place, as far up stream as possible, to let the most critical decision insight flood through the operations.
21. Remember to thank your CIO for everything they are doing often.

Conclusion

You can be bold or you can be cautious when it comes to investment in digital but you can’t be both.  You decide which one you want to be.  But all businesses are becoming technology businesses and not is not the time for CEOs and boards to be timid. 

Business basics still matter. 

Happy staff stay longer and innovate more often than unhappen staff as they are willing to take calculated risks. Happy staff create happy customers. 

Happy customers who get the products or services they want, on the device they choose, at the price and time they want feel listened to and spend more.

Technology and data can help deliver superlative digital experiences that delight and excite.  When that happens profits tend to follow which any CEO can be proud of.