The CIO’s survival guide for board engagement: 4 steps to success

Being a CIO isn’t getting any easier. The tolerance for outages and downtime is extremely low. Keeping your organization operational requires constant vigilance and rigorous processes. 

The board is placing great expectations on the CIO. The growing realization of the cost of digital downtime has pushed CIOs into the spotlight, increasing the pressures they face. CIOs can no longer only engage with the board when there is a problem. They must insert themself early to educate their board and lay the groundwork for success. 

So, how can CIOs survive engaging with their board?

1.     Illustrate the complexity of operations

The way businesses work has become significantly more complex. Technological developments – together with more stringent regulatory requirements – have created major challenges for CIOs. They must juggle the complexity of multi-cloud environments, hybrid work, and regulatory and privacy compliance. Each of these presents challenges, but when coupled with customer and shareholder expectations for zero downtime, CIOs are under significant pressure.

For CIOs to work effectively in partnership with their board, they must help them to understand how their operations work. One example is enterprise automation. Many board-level employees can appreciate the benefits of automation but haven’t been educated on how it is used within their organization. CIOs must take time to define what automation looks like in terms the board understands, explain what their company is doing with it, and the benefits. 

2.     Speak their language

Effective communication with board-level employees means two things for CIOs. The first is to pitch any information at a level that is relevant and digestible. This means approaching topics, like automation, at the architectural level. The second is to use business-oriented language. Passionate CIOs can become too invested in explaining technical aspects.

Instead of discussing code-level details, successful CIOs will explain how the processes they have implemented can contribute to success. They will explain how best practices can minimize and reduce the impact of incidents and educate colleagues on existing architecture and where processes can be optimized, and software consolidated. By speaking the language of the board, CIOs can bridge the knowledge gap and ensure the board feels the technology stack is resilient and driving clear business impact.

3.     Collaborate with your board

Communication is a two-way street. While CIOs must provide actionable information, they also need the board to keep them accountable. This involves an assessment of priorities and best practices. 

This process is also important to set performance benchmarks, ensuring total transparency about performance and highlighting risks. It also opens the door for a full assessment of the organization’s crisis management process, identifying any issues that may arise from the number and range of crises that could impact the business. This allows CIOs to work with the board to plug gaps before they impact well-being.

As incidents occur, this process ensures CIOs can join board meetings and be transparent about crisis response. Even when they have an action plan for crisis resolution, they must be able to show the board the corrective action being taken and align this with previously agreed benchmarks. This process is vital to ensure a constant upward curve of improvement.

4.     Manage operations effectively

Once the education stage has been completed, CIOs must ensure that they stick to the plan and ensure best practices are followed. There are a few ways CIOs can demonstrate to the board that they are performing well:

• Remaining a calm point of contact for on-call teams – the CIO can’t be the one behaving like their hair is on fire
• Work with data and facts to establish effective solutions
• Be transparent and over-communicate with board-level colleagues

For example, with incident response, CIOs should continue to communicate with the board, explaining what occurred, the timeline of events, how the incident was communicated, and the root cause. This is vital to improving incident response so that learnings contribute to an organization’s preparedness for future crises.

Surviving or thriving?

CIOs often opt to avoid engaging with the board until a problem arises. This approach promotes a negative, reactive incident response strategy, with minimal communication, and creates the impression that everything is fine. Digital incidents or security issues have become almost inevitable, so CIOs must take the time to educate the board about the processes that are in place to mitigate security risks, and what incident resolution workflows look like. By emphasizing why this matters – rather than how it works – CIOs can educate their board, which helps the CIO to thrive, rather than merely survive.  Learn more about how CIOs can take advantage of AIOps today