Does Your Board Have Your Back? | 5G And Cloud Computing | WWE Fights The Pandemic With Tech

Plus: Why Customer Success Is More Critical Than Ever At Cloud-Native Companies

Hello, and welcome to the latest issue of the Forbes CIO newsletter.

How can you tell whether your board is fully on board with the tech strategy you’ve laid out for your company? Informal discussions with directors and formal board meetings will certainly help you gauge where things stand. But there’s another, often-overlooked indicator CIOs should pay close attention to: their companies’ proxy statements.

As Forbes CIO Network Contributor Noah Barsky points out in a recent post, proxies aren’t just sources of information about things such as executive compensation and relationships with auditors. They also increasingly spell out how boards are thinking about technology strategies and the governance issues associated with them.

Some companies such as Walmart now devote significant space in their proxies to tech-related issues. In its 2020 proxy, the retailer notes that tech smarts rank just below retailing experience in a list of the top skills it’s looking for in directors and that its board has created a specific technology and ecommerce committee—a move that’s still relatively rare amongst companies. Walmart’s proxy also mentions the word “technology” no less than 43 times, underlining its board’s focus on the issue.

Other companies’ boards are putting more emphasis on things such as technology committees too in order to signal their focus on tech leadership. Fifth Third Bank even shares the charter of its board’s committee publicly so that investors can see the scope of its responsibilities.

Of course, there’s no guarantee boards that talk up IT in proxies will be totally supportive of tech leaders’ strategies. But proxy statements that barely mention technology, or are completely silent about it, should set alarm bells ringing in CIOs’ offices.

Thanks for reading and do please send me your tips, thoughts, questions and ideas for future issues at mgiles@forbes.com. You can also follow me on Twitter and on LinkedIn. And if you enjoy reading this newsletter please recommend it to others who may find it useful.

Technology & Innovation

Cybersecurity: A startup called Abnormal Security harnesses behavioral profiling—the approach that companies such as Twitter and Facebook use to target ads—to better anticipate and counter socially engineered email attacks. Perhaps it’s on to something: the company more than tripled its valuation, to over $500 million, in a recent fundraising round.

Cloud computing and 5G: Companies such as IBM and Microsoft are providing tools to help telecoms companies move to cloud-based services which will make it easier for them to modernize infrastructure needed to support 5G networks.

Leadership & Strategy

AI and the workforce: AI gives CIOs and other top executives powerful tools with which to gauge things such as workforce morale. However, a big barrier to adopting these tools (aside from concern over privacy and other issues) is that managers often overrate their ability to assess their workforces’ motivation and don’t feel they need algorithms to assist them.

Customer experience: Delighting customers matters more than ever in these economically challenging times. To gauge how your company is doing on this front, here’s some helpful data on Net Promoter Scores that can be used for benchmarking.

Talent & Careers

Diversity and inclusion: D&I should be a key business objective, but many leaders fail to understand that creating more inclusive companies starts with them. One way to boost inclusion is to celebrate differing points of view and ways of thinking in teams. Another is to notice who is left out and then become an "ambassador of their awesomeness," publicly supporting them and their voice. Here are some more ways that CIOs and other leaders can foster inclusion.

Skills development: IT professionals can boost their pay, increase their marketability and close their skills gaps by earning one or more certifications. This makes it in employers’ best interests to pay for certification training to upskill their workforces. According to Global Knowledge’s 2020 IT Skills and Salary Report, these are the tech certifications and expertise that pay the most.

"People are able to view [the wrestlers] at home and then we’re getting the video back in real time from [fans] to…integrate that on to our production screening."

Rajan Mehta

Chief product and technology officer, WWE

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