Are CIOs Bamboozling Their Colleagues With ‘Technobabble’?

IT professionals are jeopardising their credibility with the board by focusing too much on technology and not enough on strategy, one recruitment agency has warned.

And worryingly, this is coming at a time when industry insight suggests that the role of the IT leader is evolving into a more strategic business position, according to ReThink Recruitment.

Strategic role

A recent report from Forbes found that executive teams want CIOs to take more of a strategic role in charting the business’s future. However, ReThink Recruitment – a specialist business and IT recruiter – argues that too many professionals still struggle to demonstrate the financial and business value of technology for an organisation.

According to ReThink, this inability to directly link IT innovation to business goals and demonstrate return on investment will only damage a professional’s ability to gain future buy-in for technological developments – an issue that stems from an ongoing lack of business acumen from many CIOs.

And as technology looks set to play an integral part in an organisation’s operations in the near future, executive teams will only continue to look to CIOs to educate the wider company as to the role this function plays in a corporate strategy.

Michael Bennett, managing director of ReThink Recruitment, said: “Executive teams are actively looking to IT leaders to demonstrate and explain the value of technology for the company, but are often faced with a stream of technical information that has little value to them. While the board perhaps doesn’t yet understand the true impact of technology, CIOs in turn are arguably unable to articulate how systems are aligned to, and benefit, the wider corporate goals.

“And while I would certainly argue that members of the executive team need to invest time to understand the value technology innovation has to the business, initial conversations need to be driven by the CIO. Consequently, if IT professionals are to really gain, and hold on to, an influential seat at the CEO’s table, they need to be able to clearly communicate how technology relates to – and indeed drives – corporate growth strategies. This can only really be achieved if CIOs learn to speak the language of the business rather than that of IT.”

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