Adding IT to the boardroom round table in Singapore

More often than not, IT managers tend to take a back seat, letting their colleagues in other departments run the show. They take the direction set by the C-level suits in the company and work to make sure IT fits into their plans.

However, most do not realise that the opinion and guidance of IT professionals has become critical to effective business decision-making. In order to realise this fast changing trend in the corporate world, IT professionals need to break out of the perception that they belong in the server room instead of the boardroom.

To do this, IT managers will need to translate their knowledge of technical systems and processes into insights that business people can understand. They will also have the power and the responsibility to defuse technology hype and define targets for their co-workers that could pave the way to business success.

This sounds like a huge leap for the humble IT manager, but the majority of them already feel up to the task. They are ready to take more of a leading role in the direction of their company.

In SolarWinds’ New IT Survey, 96 percent of IT professionals surveyed said they feel at least quite confident in providing advice on critical business decisions – and almost half said they were completely confident that they could do so. Yet although we found that almost every IT professional has delivered this guidance and counsel at one time or another, 7 in 10 only get the chance to do so occasionally or rarely.

This suggests that businesses have yet to fully tap into the diverse technical expertise that their IT managers can bring to the boardroom table. IT professionals, however, can quite easily make their potential decision-making value known – all they have to do is align what they know with what the business wants and needs and seek out opportunities to jump on the bandwagon.

According to Robert Half’s 2014 employment report which ran a survey amongst 400 corporate leaders, many businesses in Singapore are confident of the growth prospects of the IT industry. The overall confidence in the sector has risen to 92% in total levels of confidence in 2014 as compared to 66% last year.

This is more than enough encouragement for top management in local Singapore-based companies to hire IT professionals as part of their plans to grow. With this forecast alone, IT professionals in Singapore will be given the chance to step up and make plans alongside their counterparts to move companies forward.

Here are five tips which can help the typical tech professional stand out amongst their peers in their own IT crowd:

Speak the language
Those who live outside the server room often have a pathological fear of the jargon and technical terms that IT managers are known to bandy around. Popular culture probably hasn’t helped this misperception, but IT professionals can help make their own case by working on how they translate the technical implications of a system into laypersons’ terms.

Being able to succinctly and patiently explain how a system works will give executives and business leads greater buy-in to the technology that’s powering their operations. IT managers can further boost their business-lingo skills by talking to their counterparts in sales, marketing, and PR – they’re the best placed to gain effective communications tips and help better explain a piece of complex technology.

Remember: there’s no way you’ll be trusted with major business decisions if you talk like Moss.

Focus on actions, not features
IT managers have a tendency to emphasise the specs and features of solutions, rather than what they can do to help meet the business’ overarching goals. Instead of just describing the capabilities of technology, they should frame them in terms of business actions: “what can we do (better) with this?” rather than “what does this widget do?”

This hammers home the relevance of the platform or solution in a manner that executives can not only understand, but support as actionable for the business. To do this most effectively, IT managers need to cultivate knowledge of what the board is aiming to do: around 44 percent of those we surveyed said they could do with a better understanding of their company’s overall business.

By clearly highlighting the correlations between technology and ROI, IT pros can forge stronger partnerships with executives and build up that understanding over time.

Up-skill to manage (lofty) expectations
Hard technical evidence is the perfect antidote to hype. More than 50 percent of the IT professionals we surveyed said that cloud computing and information security would grow most in demand of any skillsets in the next 3 to 5 years. No surprises there, given the constant spotlight on the cloud’s transformative potential and the high-profile nature of threats to organisational data.

IT managers should definitely focus on developing skills in these fast-growing areas; more importantly, however, they should use the resultant expertise to both meet and manage expectations from business leaders.

IT managers’ technical nous gives them the credibility to rein in overzealous technology adoption, by highlighting the potential risks that this “me too” approach can pose if it isn’t informed by thorough requirements-gathering and planning.

They should also take the initiative to suggest more appropriate solutions based on the underlying business needs that are driving enthusiasm or fear: a hybrid cloud, for example, may balance the security fears of a finance executive and the campaign vision of a marketing leader.

Use data to set better metrics
IT managers have access to vast amounts of organisational data, much of which can be used to optimise broader business processes and product/service delivery. By developing a decent overview of this data, and putting in place tools that can effectively track it, they can define new KPIs and metrics that are not just quantifiable, but also directly correlated with business performance.

Tracking network traffic, for example, makes sense for both marketing campaigns (external browsers) and flexible work initiatives (employees’ devices). Once IT professionals identify the core business imperatives at play, they can use that knowledge to better inform the targets that the business sets itself, and how these targets are measured.

Send word from the coal-face
Finally, IT professionals often interact with a broad range of employees and customers far more than board-level executives get to do. And while isolated reports of “my computer isn’t turning on” may not have relevance to enterprise strategy, the attentive IT pro is likely to get wind of mission-critical trends – like poor quality-of-service, increasing outages, or malfunctioning hardware fleets – that do.

By transmitting these issues and their related counsel to other business leaders, IT managers can do a lot to stop them escalating or identify new opportunities for organisational growth.

The server room may always feel like home, but for many businesses the boardroom is where the IT leader is needed the most. With technology playing such an important role in business, the IT professional’s opinion has become relevant to the big decisions that organisations make.

The need to translate their technical knowledge into insights and provide sound advice that will directly impact the wellbeing of their companies from the adoption of new technologies to the basic processes of product development and sales has become vital if not critical in the business world.