A CIO Change Leadership Strategy Framework for the Digital Era: The Board of Directors

A CIO Change Leadership Strategy Framework for the Digital Era: The Board of Directors

This IDC Perspective focuses on working with the board and describes the specific goals and actions needed to motivate and shape engagements and outcomes, identifies challenges unique to the board, and provides advice on creating change leadership strategies that will engage, influence, and guide the actions of boards of directors. This document is the first of a series of three covering CIO change leadership with, respectively, boards of directors, LOB executive peers (for more details, see A CIO Change Leadership Strategy Framework for the Digital Era: LOB Executives, IDC #US50351023, forthcoming), and their own direct reports (for more details, see A CIO Change Leadership Strategy Framework for the Digital Era: The CIO's Direct Reports, IDC #US50351223, forthcoming).As digital technologies and new business models roil and disrupt industries, markets, and businesses, the CIO's ability to lead change effectively is critical to help shape the digital business, keep all constituencies aligned and marching in lockstep, and help the business turn on a dime to adapt to rapidly changing business environments.For significant digital initiatives, change leadership strategies start with the board, as without board support CIOs will founder or fail. While it may seem strange for CIOs to think of "leading" the board, that is in fact what they need to do. Board members are people, albeit with power and budget authority, and as such they need to be educated, engaged, persuaded, and even excited about digitally fueled change in order to lend their essential support."Leading change of any sort involving people is hard, as many inherently hew to the familiar status quo," says Marc Strohlein, adjunct research advisor with IDC's IT Executive Programs (IEP). "For CIOs, leading change is even more challenging as they have three distinct stakeholder audiences: the board of directors, LOB executives, and direct reports. Each audience has a unique profile, concerns, and considerations, as well as levers that will spur actions and decisions."

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