How To Make Your C-Suite Executives More IT-Savvy?
Business and IT teams don’t go along well with one another. You will always find them complaining about each other. Ask a business leader and they will tell you that IT doesn’t understand how business works. Interestingly, IT leaders will echo the same sentiments about business teams.
There is no denying the fact that there is mostly a disconnect between IT and business teams. This usually happens because departments function independently and usually in isolation but not anymore. In today’s age of collaboration and cross-functional teams, both business leaders and IT leaders as well as their teams need to understand the pain points of others and work collectively to achieve a common objective.
C-suite executives can no longer afford to stay oblivious to IT and should work on improving their knowledge about information technology. IT leaders can play a crucial role in increasing IT awareness of board members and top business executives and making their C-suite executives more IT-savvy.
In this article, you will learn about seven ways to make your C-suite executives more IT savvy.
How to Make Your C-Suite Executives IT-Savvy?
Here are some of the tactics you can use to make your C-suite executives more IT-savvy:-
1. Expand Your Influence and Business Knowledge
Start off by growing your business knowledge. CIOs should spend time and energy on growing their business knowledge base. This will help them clearly communicate their message to business leaders and help them understand the internal processes in a much better way. Moreover, this will enable them to advise even top board members and other management members on emerging trends and technologies that are dominating the tech industry. The more knowledge you have about the business, the more effectively you can communicate with different stakeholders. This opens up new avenues and opportunities for building relationships that would help you in the long run.
2. Support Business Strategy
One of the most common questions business leaders asks IT leaders is what role IT is playing to support the current business strategy. More importantly, how investments in IT are increasing revenue, growth, and margins? How is it helping businesses in improving the customer experience? As an IT leader, your job is to highlight how IT investments are curbing business risk and allowing businesses to achieve higher scalability, performance, and reliability.
You need to go deeper and illustrate it with a real-life example and clearly tell which features are contributing to the betterment of your organization and how. CIOs should also highlight areas that require further improvements and set KPIs to track progress. When business leaders see that you are seriously supporting their business strategy, they will also lend your support and will be more open to listening to what you have to say.
3. Understand the Business Impact
If you want to get buy-in from business leaders for your IT initiatives, you need to understand the business impact of the technology you are trying to implement such as VPS Singapore. As an IT leader, you should explain the benefits of technology and how the business can use it to its advantage.
This will make it easier for business leaders to understand the true potential of the technology and make it easy for you to decide whether to invest in cheap dedicated hosting or not. Tell them what business goals your technology initiatives can help them achieve and they will surely give you the green signal.
4. Put Yourself In the Shoes of Business Leader
One of the biggest reasons behind the discourse between IT and business leaders is that IT leaders have a poor understanding of business processes and how it works. If CIOs get over this shortcoming by developing a deeper understanding of how enterprises work, they can present themselves as partners to business leaders instead of adversaries.
When business leaders start to see you as a partner, they are more likely to engage with you, trust you and be open to change. They will start trusting you and see you as an enabler who can help them achieve the overarching business goals. Speak in the language of business and use words and sentences that business leaders use.
5. Collaborate and Give Advice
Once you have changed your perception in the eyes of a business leader, now you can collaborate with them and offer them advice. For instance, business and IT leaders can collaborate to develop an action plan. When having a conversation, make sure to personalize your messaging and tailor it according to their needs.
Whenever you are having a conversation, first listen and then talk. Try to understand the pain points of the business leaders and their perspectives on things. This will help you give them the right advice and recommend the right solution to their problem. Your goal is to make business leaders understand the why behind the technology.
6. Networking
One thing that most IT leaders tend to overlook is the importance of networking. Developing healthy relationships with management peers and others will help you get your foot in the door. It could begin with a small chit-chat at the room cooler and matures during weekly or monthly meetings. When talking to business leaders, you should share your knowledge first so they can correct you if you are wrong and then highlight how technology initiatives can come in handy.
7. Sow The Seed of Curiosity
Business leaders are usually not interested in improving their IT knowledge base. CIOs need to encourage business leaders by clook. Yes, it can be uncharted territory for business leaders which is why they might be reluctant in the first place but if you can convince them that improving their IT knowledge can help them make better decisions then, they might change their mindset. If you are using technical terms and tech jargon in your conversations cheapest dedicated server hosting, take time to explain it in simple words so business leaders not only understand what you say but also try to explore it later on in detail.
