I was having coffee with a friend of mine who is the CEO of a mid-sized business in Waukesha. We were talking about his company’s information technology and he was asking me what his role should be. He told me what he does, which is too far in the details. He said he had daily meetings with the PM to get his ERP delivered. He also has to meet with vendors to do purchase evaluations. It got me thinking about what he should be doing.
I went to the internet and looked to see what Google thought he should be doing. In looking for material I found lots of information from the 90s and some from the 2000s, but any article that mentions Y2K as something an executive should be doing is a little out of date.
I did find some things, made some stuff up and pulled stuff from here and there and came up with this list of 5 IT responsibilities a mid-sized business executive should take on:
- Choose an IT management model
- Make that model part of your agenda
- Become an early adopter
- Use your IT data
- Use your personal network to learn what is new
Choose an IT management model – There are 2 basic models for managing IT. One is to manage costs and the other to manage value. Most mid-sized businesses choose to manage their IT by costs. See our blog post here on managing costs. It is much easier to say “We will only spend 4.6% of revenue on IT.” It is more difficult to say we will make IT investment decisions in the same way that we make any business investment decision.
Business leaders are very familiar with deciding how to buy a new machine or expand a plant or hire employees. The ROI of those investments is usually easy to determine. How does an executive determine the value of an IT investment?
In choosing the value IT management model an executive needs to ensure that their finance and IT teams have strong capabilities in building out ROI models for IT investments. With a strong ROI model it is possible to compare an IT investment to any other investment in the company. Without that IT investments are easier to manage on a cost basis.
Make that model part of your agenda – There are 5 key items to making IT part of your executive agenda. At the board level you should include discussion of these 5 things.
- Strategic Alignment
- Value Generation
- Information Security
- Risk Management
- IT Human Capital Management
See our post here for more details on making these items part of your board agenda.
Become an early adopter – When I worked in IT for a fortune 50 company, it always amazed me when the CEO would send out notes talking about our travel policy. The notes always mentioned how we needed to limit travel and how our video conferencing was a great way to do that. However aside from the “televised” quarterly meetings the leadership team never failed to travel someplace for their meetings. It was so hypocritical.
As a leader become an early adopter of technology. Use the video conferences, go paperless, keep your calendar up to date, and be a user of your business applications. Executives lead by example in many other ways, make an effort for IT to be one of those ways.
Use your IT data – Just like being an early adopter shows the ability to lead by example, so does using the data from IT. Information Technology is all about data, there will be data about technology and data about business. Looking at the data from the business is often times easy to do. It is much more difficult to look at technology data. Look at the SLAs for operations teams, look at the data about servers and networks, and understand the data from technology investments.
It is not necessary to dig into details here. It is important to get this information on a page (dashboard). There should also be details that can be looked at but the dashboards should be used regularly to understand the health and trends of IT.
Use your personal network to learn what is new – Lastly use your personal network to learn what is new. It is not feasible for an executive to keep up with technology alone. That is where networking comes in. Find out what others are doing. Have coffee with the IT guy who lives down the street or plays volleyball on the same team. Talk about IT in your networking with other executives. Search out IT savvy people on LinkedIn and network with them.
When I met with my friend, I showed him PowerBI, OneNote and HubSpot. All new things he took back to his business. IT guys groan when an executive comes in with some idea they got from the street. However, It is the best way to keep the IT team thinking about what new things are coming and how they will impact the business. Sometimes that little prod will spur the team into something else that is even bigger than the original idea. A personal network is an important way to keep that creativity flowing.
About the author:
Greg Stellflue has 25 years of experience in project management, application ownership and software development. With over 30 years of industry experience he has focused on advancing information technology capabilities in many different organizations.
Email: greg.stellflue@level5iveconsulting.com
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