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.

Comments

Banks' ace in the hole: Legislators, not tech.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Banks used to make money by lending money to other risk takers, while the bank itself preferred the low risk-sure return interest income. Then in USA they removed the barrier between banking and investing. So the banks started investing other people's money, going for higher return for higher risk business. Then they realized, they have the entire civilization in their control, their high risk bets are so thoroughly mingled with world financial systems, they will not go bankrupt no matter what they do. The governments must bail them out. So now they are in a situation, "make high risk bets, keep the profits when they are good, pass on the losses to the society when they go bad". Morgan-Stanley into commodity trading, shipping the aluminium back and forth between two warehouses and somehow make money off that insane thing. At this point who needs technology? All they need are diabolical supervillains to imagine crazy schemes, lobbyists to make those schemes legal, and lawyers to implement those schemes.

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.

wrong quest

[whistlingtony]

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....

This one thing is unlike the other

[rmdingler]

Unless the tech savvy corporate honcho is a founder of the company, it seems likely the person in the boardroom is a ladder-climbing, win at all costs personality type.

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.

Re:This one thing is unlike the other

[BVis]

That, and there's a virulent belief that IT can simply be outsourced.

That's not so much a belief as a truth. You can outsource your IT, firms exist to do that. You will probably save money doing that, and that's all that matters to the suits. Nevermind that now it takes three weeks to get a problem fixed instead of same-day, and your workers get so fed up with the lousy service the outsourced IT provides that they just let problems continue without asking for them to be fixed. This hurts your business in lost productivity.

But, productivity is hard to measure. Dollars are not, and the outsourcing saves dollars. This makes it a perfect solution for the folks that can't turn on their computers without a cheat sheet.

Expert Plumbers and Carpenters on the Board

[Anonymous Coward]

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.