Corporate Directors in the Dark About IT
ZDNet’s Joe McKendrick sheds some light on a recent survey of 204 corporate directors who say they’re dissatisfied with the level and quality of communication coming from their IT departments:
Now a new survey of 204 corporate board members finds that almost half (47%) of corporate directors surveyed are dissatisfied with their boards’ ability to provide information technology (IT) risk oversight. A recent survey from Oliver Wyman and the National Association of Corporate Directors (NACD) finds that, while virtually all board members acknowledge that IT will have a significant business impact on the companies they govern over the next five years, more than half, 51%, say they are not given enough information to perform their oversight duties effectively.
I think a lot of us this saw this coming.
To me, the ‘IT-business alignment’ was a bubble inflated by analysts, management and internal marketing that had no chance of not bursting. It was great PowerPoint fodder, but it was rarely put into practice effectively. And now we get surveys pointing that out.
With new executives to business technology making up a considerable portion of senior executives overall, it’s time for IT to reconsider how it communicates with upper management. The challenge is what it’s always been: specialists need to communicate effectively with generalists, but it’s time we put in neon lights that the onus is on the IT department to get this communication under way. They have the knowledge, they know what projects and business processes are getting their focus and cash. It’s incumbent on the IT department to open and fortify the lines of communication with executive management.
The last thing IT wants is for this trend to continue to the point where IT initiatives are compromised because management doesn’t understand what value is coming from all of the expensive, long-running projects IT is spearheading. Then, IT is nothing but a cost center and will be regarded as such. The remedy? A clear understanding of business value and how IT is creating/supporting it.
Of course, this entire thing is a defensive gig: I’m sure IT feels spurned to some degree because not every one of its projects is success, and that is certainly visible and understandable to even the newest senior executive. A big red X is elementary to just about anyone in the organization. Trust becomes tattered. One or two red Xes, and you’ve got yourself a defensive posture that doesn’t lend itself to regular and open communication. And you’ve got two groups who didn’t understand one another at first, and certainly don’t after some zeroes start getting tacked onto project costs and timelines get dragged through the mud.
The bubble has burst. And it’s time to start reaching out and truly communicating — all over again. As one commenter at ZDNet says (and he’s an IT guy), ‘Come on IT! It’s time to get up in the face of the business!”
Indeed.
A full summary of the NACD report is posted at the Oliver Wyman Website.
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