Get on the Agenda Once you have your own chair in the executive conference room, you have to make good use of the meeting time. Key is making IT a permanent item on the executive committee's monthly agenda. Use the time to educate colleagues about the benefits and risks of new technologies and get feedback about how your organization is performing. It's also an opportunity to set the expectations of other CXOs about upcoming projects. Educate other executives about what technology can, and can't, do.
One of our best practices CIOs cited an example. He explained that at his organization it's a corporate priority to do more business with customers online this year. But he noted that there are many misconceptions about how much connectivity is possible. "Connections are a broad, utopian concept," he said. "Each [business] executive was operating with his own understanding of what it really meant." This CIO took advantage of his monthly platform to establish a common understanding about the type of online interactions that were technically and operationally feasible. Without that consensus, "there's a strong risk marketing teams would sell something we couldn't deliver or that was inappropriate technologically", he said.
Another suggestion - especially if your organization is about to undertake a large IT initiative or is undergoing a major IT transformation - was to try and establish a standing, hour-long meeting once a week - or at a frequency that works for you - with the CEO to talk about anything that either of you have on your minds.
Speak Their Language Our best practices CIOs agree that when talking with other executives it's important to speak in terms of business strategy. One CIO we spoke to got approval for an unbudgeted expenditure on software licences for demand planning, inventory planning and some CRM tools among other applications. "Some of those needs we'd identified for years and hadn't moved on because other projects took priority," the CIO said. He decided it was time to move forward when a vendor with whom he already had a relationship offered him a good deal on a bundle of licences. He explained to his executive colleagues the advantages of locking in a good price on software licences that the company would need in the future. He described how the expenditure would affect the IT budget and emphasized that the purchase would not commit the company to a major new system deployment that would disrupt existing projects. It was a compelling case.
When the executive team comes to understand the business value of a project, they'll be allies when it's time to execute it. That's one reason why access to senior executives is critical, even if a CIO isn't on the top management team.
Our CIOs said if you're not an executive committee member then try for "an open invitation" to bring any high-level IT concerns to the group. For example, one CIO used her "open invitation" to get help from top management when it was time to roll out the company's supplier extranet. "Top management worked with a lot of our regional execs and brought them into the process much more quickly than I could," she said. Senior executives made the deployment a topic on the agenda for an offsite meeting, where they presented the concept, reviewed the results of a pilot project and described the next steps of the rollout.
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