CIOs must become chief IT evangelists

Technology evangelists abound in the IT sector, but typically the term is used to describe a marketing-related role aimed at promoting a product, service, or technology. These external-facing positions have been established to educate users and enterprises about a company’s offerings and inspire those potential customers to adopt them.

Individuals who succeed in these roles are influencers who understand technology value propositions and how to present them to prospective customers.

That same objective is just as vital for internal-facing products, services, and technologies as well. And while you don’t find the term evangelist in CIO job descriptions, a growing number of CIOs are realizing that a little technology evangelism can go a long way in selling their digital initiatives and sparking enthusiasm.

After all, change management is a vital component of digital transformation success. Evangelizing for that change — from the very beginning — can make all the difference.

Why be an evangelist?

Education and enthusiasm about digital projects are what sell them, and when it comes to securing funding and backing for digital projects from organizational decision-makers, it’s often job No. 1 for CIOs to do the selling.

Of course, the “customer” audience that a CIO must sell digital initiatives to varies.

Those who need to be persuaded might be the CEO, CFO, and other C-level executives. They could also be the corporate board. Then there are the users and IT staff that require inspiration. Each audience needs a different selling technique if they are to invest their enthusiasm into a digital project.

CIOs aren’t always alone in this endeavor. For example, a medical group that wants to digitalize patient records to streamline workflows might want to advocate for a digitalization project to do so. Inevitably, such a project will require the CIO to join the selling team for the project, because IT will be the ones performing the systems integration and technical work, and it’s IT that’s typically tasked with vetting and pricing out any new hardware, software, or cloud services that come through the door.

It’s also important to note that evangelism isn’t a onetime effort of educating and building enthusiasm. I know of one case of a CIO delegating a large digitalization project to his staff after kicking it off with rousing enthusiasm. As the long and arduous project went on, the CIO assumed his IT staff would remain enthusiastic and focused because he had “given them their marching orders, and they know what they’re expected to do.”

Moving on to other work, the CIO seldom checked in on the project, so IT staff began to develop a perception of him being preoccupied with other matters in some distant ivory tower while they toiled away on a digital rock pile. The project began to sputter, not because it grew more technically challenging, but because IT staff began to lose interest, seeing that their boss didn’t seem to have any. This project was headed for failure. It likely would have failed, had it not been for the CIO’s own self-corrective actions, which led to him reinserting himself into the project and re-energizing his staff.

IT evangelism best practices

Leading digital projects can quickly become a fragile exercise if CIOs fail to remain actively engaged. Successful digital CIOs know this, which its why they lead by example, communicate clearly, continually spark enthusiasm, and present commonsense business and technology reasons why each project they advocate for benefits the business.

In drumming up enthusiasm for their projects, these stellar digital CIOs do three things extremely well:

They’re business thought leaders

Ten years ago, it was acceptable to just say, “We want to become paperless, develop a database, and save floorspace,” to kick off a digital project. Efforts like this spirited the first round of digital projects, but now expectations from the business are greater. How much revenue will the new project generate? How much will it reduce corporate operating expenses? If the project reduces time to decision, will it make a difference as to how well we satisfy our customers, how quickly we bring new product to market, or how quickly we respond to new market, regulatory, or environmental conditions?

Project by project, the CIO is expected to bring hard-hitting, “breakthrough” business strategies to the table that digitalization can address. Cultivating business-centric IT and becoming a thought leader — not just for technology but the business as a whole — is a key step to ensuring projects not only receive buy-in but succeed.

They educate

The job of the digital CIO is to raise awareness of critical business needs that can be remedied with digital technology, and to then explain in plain English how the technology works and why it can deliver business value. This includes describing in straightforward language the infrastructure — network, storage, processing, and so on — that supports the project, and why infrastructure investments are needed.

Once as CIO, I had my CEO ask me about the infrastructure elements for a digital project in a somewhat roundabout way. It wasn’t until I got back to my office that I realized that he was indirectly asking me to explain the technology infrastructure of the project to him so he could clearly understand. He wanted to be in a position to provide an answer should a board member ask him. I circled back with a memorandum in plain English that I sent to all C-level executives.

They inspire

Digital projects are long, and there are tasks within them (e.g., data conversions, interface mapping, data item tagging and indexing, etc.) that can be time-consuming and laborious. Yet, it’s a tendency of many CIO’s to take their IT staffs — and staff enthusiasm levels — for granted.

The most successful digital CIOs assume nothing. They get out from behind their desks and personally check in with IT staff members at all project levels. It shows ongoing CIO commitment to the project, and often the CIO is in a position to cure a challenge if the acquisition of a particular tool, capability, or competency can help.