Smart Decision-Making for Future-Ready Organizations

Transcript

Glen Willis

Hi, I’m Glen Willis, Director of Cyber Technology at Kalles Group. I want to take a couple of minutes with you today to talk about governance. As a technology leader, I’m going to focus mostly on technology governance.

At its essence, governance is about two things:

• How do we make decisions
• How do we hold our organization accountable to the decisions we make

So those are the two pieces we’re going to break down here.

Starting with decision making:

Typically, in a technology organization, that’s going to be an executive team of some kind. But an executive team often doesn’t have the context, knowledge, expertise, or specialization in all cases to make decisions without the right kind of input from their organization.

So the other big part of decision making is: how do you get the right experts contributing knowledge and experience into the decision process

For an enterprise, those experts might be mostly internal. For a smaller organization like a startup or a small to medium sized business, there might be more of a blend of internal and external expertise. External expertise can be very helpful, for example, when an organization is bringing in a technology that is brand new to them.

Depending on what kind of decision is being made, getting the right technical expertise, architects, engineers, or other technology voices inside and outside the company, is key. If it’s more of a functional decision, functional expertise is important. If there’s history in the organization that needs to be understood, experiential expertise is also important to include in those conversations.

The input part of decision making is possibly the most critical. It’s about soliciting expertise from people who hold the knowledge and experience that can truly add value to the process.

Few things feel worse to an organization than hearing about an executive decision that seems to come out of nowhere. When there has not been any effort to allow people time to socialize the potential change, ask questions, or provide input, it can feel disconnected. Often, middle and junior management, those closest to the work, have the richest input to offer. A healthy governance program prioritizes and values those voices.

Once a decision is made, the next part is communication:

How do you communicate the decision in a way that creates real clarity of expectations

The what, how, and by when are three things you want to make clear to the organization.

A few examples:

• An organization using a single cloud provider wants to move to multi cloud to reduce vendor risk
• You have several CRM systems due to a busy period of M and A, and you want to consolidate to one to reduce costs
• Internal alignment within technology is needed to ensure investment priorities match business priorities

Let’s say a new CIO or CTO inherits a situation where the current investment alignment does not connect with where the business wants to go. Communicating clearly around these types of scenarios is critical. Everyone in the organization should understand what, how, and by when.

Accountability is not just top down:

I spent a number of years in the Air Force and experienced a very top down culture, understandable in that context. But in modern business, it is about setting expectations and balancing that with support.

It is not just “do it,” without access to questions, context, or help.

Depending on the change, support might include:

• Retraining or reskilling
• Adopting new technology
• Functional changes
• Organizational restructuring

My encouragement is to think about the balance between accountability and supporting the organization in aligning with and executing the decision that has been made.

These are just high level thoughts on some things that are important to get right. At Kalles Group, we believe governance leads to alignment, clarity of expectations, clarity of roles and responsibilities, clarity of mission, and more.

It is important to prioritize governance in how you run your technology organization.

If you have questions about governance in your organization and want to talk, we would love to have a helpful conversation with you.