Technology management is a board issue

My most recent piece in the Financial Times stresses the importance of the technology management at board level. Click here to read the article. Here I am trying to shift the thinking that IT is just an IT department issue to being one that needs boardroom control. Given that IT is a significant investment of corporate spend simply leaving its management to a division of the business seems very much to me like poor governance.

I have had a number of discussions on this with business leaders and practically all disagree that choice of programming language is not a business-call. I think it is if there are strategic business implications. I mention this in the FT piece.

Anand Sanwal author of Corporate Portfolio Management posted a comment in response to  this article via his own blog, which can be read via the following link. Click here.  Anand suggested that I was propagating the 'IT as a victim' theme. Possibly I was. However my overriding thrust is that the boardroom should raise its game in respect of IT value maximisation, but so should the IT function. Though the latter view may not have rung so loud in this recent piece. I believe the IT function,lead by the CIO, needs to drive business at boardroom level. Unfortunately there is a dearth of such CIOs. I think this is in part because the CFOs clip their wings at the outset, and in part because the CIO sausage machine is not in general churning out the right DNA profile for what is needed.

I am in agreement with the bulk of Anand's assertions. My views are well documented on FT.com. But even with a boardroom-ready CIO there needs to be sufficient IT-competence round the table to challenge his/her decisions in line with good governance practice.