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Why All Boards Need a Technology Expert
New submitter ebonyygraham writes with an article at the Harvard Business Review about the dearth of IT savvy professionals in the boardroom. A few months ago I decided to look into the professional experience of non-executive directors at the major banks listed in Britain. Like almost every other major industry today, banking relies on hugely complex, enormously expensive technology. So I was curious as to whether the individuals charged with corporate governance would have any more than a layman's knowledge of IT. I discovered that only one bank had a board member with some direct experience in technology and in that case it was as a sales executive. I'm afraid this is typical not just in banking but across most major industries. Technology is the most important agent of change today; hardly any industry is immune to both its value-creating and disruptive potential. Yet I perceive a large gap between the direct experience of non-executive directors and the experience required to challenge and support chairmen and CEOs in their quest to bring the best technology to their business.
Given that most business "leaders" consider IT a drain on their companies and IT professionals as interchangeable cogs, you're not going to see anyone with a strong technical background on a board unless it's an organization in the the technology industry.
At this point their stranglehold is on the governments and the financial systems. Not technology, not bond-trading. Others can innovate and might even be much better than the banks in assessing risk/reward ratio. But as long as the others have to eat their losses, the banks will come out ahead.
It is not a bug there is no techie in the board. It is by design. They need diabolical monsters from the comic book super villains in the board, not techies.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
There is no "in their quest to bring the best technology to their business", because that's not their mission. They're there to make money. Even tech companies are there to make money. The technology rarely has anything to do with it. The coolest gizmo in the world won't make money without marketing and sales.
I use CNC machines in my side business of making guitars. My quest is to make money selling guitars. The CNC machine enables that, but it's not my quest to bring CNC machines to the masses. It's not even my quest to bring the latest guitar technology. Quite the opposite.
You're talking about BANKS, fer crying out loud....
Perhaps this is not the skill set that makes for the best tech minds.
That, and there's a virulent belief that IT can simply be outsourced.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
About a decade ago banks noticed that computer security becomes an issue (they are a clever bunch, after only losing a few billions they noticed that people want to steal money from them). So most, if not all, banks today have a position for a CISO in their C-Level portfolio.
The next step would probably be to actually also give him some kind of power to install and execute security processes. That's probably going to take another decade.
Why would you want to get in early in this fight? Wait for them to actually learn their lesson and then climb on board. Currently, in most banks, the CISO position is that of an ejector seat with someone else having the launch button. It's not comfy, believe me!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Yeaah ! 9 vs 1 sure he will survive against technical stupidity...
PS: I stepped down from this kind of position
IT is a blue-collar job. It's a trade. I know it, you know it, and the CEOs and boards sure as fuck know it.
Programming, Systems administration, Networking, etc, etc, is about skills, knowledge, application, results. It's about what you know, what you can do and not who you know.
Professional corporate white collar jobs like banking, finanice, accounting, law, etc are about bullshitting your way ahead and networking. They're about failing upwards and above all hiding your incompetence behind layers of social and professional obfuscation.
No fucking way is a tradesman of any kind getting near a corporate boardroom, much less a critical thinking one. Our job as tech experts is to try and make the systems these people demand as least destructful as we can, and clean up the mess when the whole house of cards eventually does fall in. Like everyone else of course, we also get the privilege of paying for it.
IT special snowflakes try to justify their commodity existence.
Would you expect executives to understand their telecom systems or how the plumbing works? It's infrastructure. You have people that manage it and provide reports. That's how a corporation works. The fact that the author mentions storing medical information in the cloud shows how clueless he is and is pushing an agenda.
When someone says technology is old and needs to be replaced because it's old does not truly understand technology. Age does not mean something needs to be replaced. Whether or not it gets the job done properly and efficiently is the point. It's a waste of resources to simply by something new. This joker does not understand that and is probably the reason why companies over spend on technology and then make drastic cut backs because they over spent.
Hraumph!
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
*blink*
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
I used to be a sys admin in a large organization that assigned sys admins to do desktop support for the top level executives. I learned that those people are more intelligent than me or my co workers and much more educated.
They had things like a chemistry bachelors and ivy league MBA. Many have PhDs. You may not know this, but a real MBA requires being comfortable with sovling diferential equations.
Frankly, there are very few people in IT that could perform in the role - IT people just have too narrow a focus.
Isn't a Sales executive with "some direct experience in technology" the worst possible choice? They've seen enough to think anything is possible.
Remember the triangle - fast, right, cheap.
Pick one. Or if you're really lucky, two.
Tech is the last thing I worry about in a board member. You can learn pretty quickly the concepts of any computer systems. Web Services? Send message. Database? Store data.
No, what I worry about is that business knowledge has been placed in IT's hands and is now trying to be recaptured. To this day I working a place where if someone wants to know a rule, they don't consult management or analysts, they don't talk to the BAs, they talk to the programmer who literally reads the code and translates it to English. And it isn't just IT. It takes a Math PhD to understand some of the investments that banks use.
A whole generation of executives have lost the ability to understand what their business does in favor of assuming that the people in IT have it. It especially important now because much the low lying fruit has been picked, i.e., getting things done faster with fewer people. Now, more than ever executives have to be innovative and now, more than ever, they're not prepared.
..not to understand tech and certainly not to plan it. The job is to shovel as much money into Oracle and Microsoft as possible, before the stockholders (or the public, in the case of government orgs) find out that it happened. And make sure you sign some long-term contracts, so that even after it's detected, it can't be fixed. Technical debt is great for this, too, so make sure you attack the owners on both fronts, to properly leach them.
When it's time to go, there will be a Sales position awaiting you at Oracle (or Microsoft) as your reward. Then collect commissions when you work with the traitor who you chose to replace you.
being the smartest guy in the room...
Printed Circuit Boards.
The author is talking about the Board of Directors. He specifically states he is not talking about the executives.
The Board represents the interests of the owners of the company, and the Board is often the actual owners.
When the owners of a bank want to study the technical details of the overall IT strategy they direct the executives to hire a team to do it, not a person.
Expending effort on acquiring in-depth IT knowledge would be a waste of time for those people.
And finally, those people are much smarter than 99.99% of the people in IT.
"We rely on it every day"
"Everyone should know the basics of it"
"All of our advancement is based on it"
Don't forget the math. It is more profound than IT.
Other boards are better off with a carpenter.
Working for a large company and the technology rules are getting dumber and dumber. Boards and technologists with no brain are forcing rules that not only make no sense but are impossible to implement all because the one's making the rules have no clue about the software they are making rules about. For example, someone must have read about C and mobile and makes the same rules apply to backend servers with java. Locking down security on a mobile device is very different from a high powered server and you cannot apply the same rules. If the rules are enforced no server will function! And these are coming from so called technology experts... no idea what's going on in the board rooms, but they must be dumber. As for the intelligent one's we smile, tell them they are wrong and follow the rules even though their own rules are actually unenforcable, as no server will function if really enforced... later on we will report no work got done because they had no idea what they were doing and would not listen to us, in the meantime we let other's smile and break the rules while not breaking them ourselves because the other's have no idea what they are doing and do not listen to us either. Good thing is most of the rules because they make no sense and trivial to work around, but of course sometimes that also means paying vendors tons of money to make their software have the trivial hacks as well. We need more representation at higher levels, before everything collapses due to intense stupidity.