What a CIO should tell the board

Dear Bob ... I shrug off system crashes. Corrupted databases don't bother me. Hackers? Let 'em come! But this has me chewing my nails: I have to make a presentation to our board of directors about the IT strategy. I'm relatively new here, and this will be my first ... I have no idea what to say to them. I know what the IT strategy is, of course, but I'm worried they won't care about any of it. So here's my quest

Dear Bob ...

I shrug off system crashes. Corrupted databases don't bother me. Hackers? Let 'em come!

But this has me chewing my nails: I have to make a presentation to our board of directors about the IT strategy. I'm relatively new here, and this will be my first ... I have no idea what to say to them. I know what the IT strategy is, of course, but I'm worried they won't care about any of it.

So here's my question: What should a CIO present to a board of directors?

- Needing to make a good first impression

Dear Impressive ...

The secret to presenting to the board of directors is the same as the secret to presenting to anyone: Empathy. Think through what the board cares about, and connect everything you know they need to know to that.

What does a board care about? It cares about increasing revenue, decreasing costs, reducing risk, and building a foundation the company can build on to support future opportunities to increase revenue, decrease costs, and reduce risk.

What doesn't a board care about? The details. Or, rather, it cares about them only to the extent that it needs to be confident someone is taking care of them. Keep in mind that the board has ten or so other subjects it has to pay at least as much attention to as IT.

There are lots of different ways to organize a presentation to the board. One way is to talk about:

* Major initiatives IT is leading or participating in. Explain these in terms of how they'll improve the business (revenue, cost, risk), not what the software is supposed to do.

* The current health of the organization, where it needs to improve, and what you're doing to improve it.

* Governance: How you're collaborating with the rest of the business to decide where to invest IT's resources.

* Areas of risk within IT and what you're doing about them.

* IT-driven industry trends (your company's industry) and how they're creating opportunities or competitive threats to the company.

This, of course, is just a sketch. My best advice is to sit down with the CEO and ask for a profile of each board member, and to ask for advice about what they're likely to want to know, and what will put them to sleep.

- Bob