During a Walmart leadership meeting in 2017, CIO Clay Johnson witnessed a seminal moment in IT-business relations. When someone suggested making the technical terms of the retailer’s IT strategy more accessible for business line leaders, Walmart CEO Doug McMillon said something novel.
He said, “Business people need to start speaking the language of technology,” Johnson said recently on a panel at the 2018 Forbes CIO Summit. “Hearing that was a pleasant surprise.”
Most CIOs today would agree. For the past decade, CIO success has been defined by being able to “speak the language of the business,” as it has been incumbent on tech leaders to understand the corporate strategy and empower business leaders with the right technologies to execute on that strategy. CIOs have struggled to explain tech initiatives through the lens of business strategy, rather than discuss the technology itself, as CEOs thus far haven’t had to care nor know what, say, Hadoop is.
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(Insider Story)
Read More from This Article: Flipping the script: Business leaders must learn the language of IT
Source: News