7 ways a CIO can boost technology skills within your business.

The most capable CIO can effectively straddle both the business and tech worlds. As such, those CIO unicorns enjoy more resources and bigger digital transformation programs than those who struggle to communicate with their board.

Business tech expertise is not universal. For example, only 1 in 10 board members of banks have technical expertise.

Expanding business tech knowledge is paramount as the pace of technological change speeds up and the cost of making technology mistakes amplifies.

There are 7 ways a CIO can help develop a business’s technology skill set.

1.????Educate the board, executive team and business. Technology coaching, product demos, speakers from industry, lunch and learns, millennial experts reverse mentoring, fund internal and external coding course, use CBL. etc. These are examples of a technology education that most businesses require.

2.????Put technology and technology literacy firmly on the executive business agenda. Make it a top 5 executive goal.?Give everyone a financial and growth incentive to invest in technology, digital and automation. And make this a significant proportion of a person’s annual income.

3.????Rotate the best talent into digital and automation roles. Create career paths for your best talent, teach them about tech and let your best talent see that technology skills are a fast route to the top of the tree.

4.????Create digital champions within the business and have those MVPs demonstrate and teach technology skills to others.

5.????Align the HR strategy with the businesses technology roadmap ensuring you are hiring top talent needed in 18 months’ from today. Follow Amazon’s ‘bar raiser’ concept and ensure every hire is far better technologically than your existing hires. This will help to raise technology performance if technology aptitude set as key hire criteria.

6.????Appoint board, executives and senior business team members who possess technology skills. Modern businesses cannot create a modern business, technology enabled strategy, without an understanding of technology. If the executive team are not technology literate then get a team that is and work to continually update their technology competence.

7.????Create a technology fund (e.g., 15% of annual turnover) and invest it in effective technology. This ensures that a business case is scrutinised and presented to the CFO who will sign off each proposal.???Make sure every business leader owns and presents a business technology proposal and can competently explain the business benefits to the board, their peers and the business. Make them report progress back often.

8.????Reward risk taking. Give those who have succeeded in the past a pot of cash they can invest without rigorous oversight and allow them the freedom to invest and experiment in technology they believe will make the most difference. Incentivise constructive risk taking and protect innovative thinking and working time (think google 20%) for employees to invent and create new digitally enabled value streams. Ensure that everyone is educated on the wins and lesson from failures that a business will experience as they technologically innovate.

9.????Hire external partners who have experience inside and outside of your industry and have them work with the board and executive team to develop a business technology strategy for the next 5 years.?Have their team start to build the roadmap but contract them to transfer knowledge, skills and capabilities to your business team and lock that into a partner exit date.

10.?Give your business teams the tools and training they need to do a great job augmented by effective technology.?Continual update their knowledge so they develop great expertise in a wide variety of technology tooling over time.

Digital transformation is a business strategy not a technology strategy. Everyone has their part to play. But for everyone to play their part they must be ready, willing and able to do so.?Education is a key part of helping develop the technology literacy and competency to digitally transform a business. CIOs must deliver learning and technology to help a business succeed.

There is a saying, you don’t know what you don’t know.?So, CIOs must teach people about technology so they do know. Digital transformation is happening with or without you.

Prepare your team and business for the consequences and opportunities technology presents or risk becoming obsolete.

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