What IT topics are top of mind at the board level?
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Now that original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) are getting together and pushing technology, the big question for boards is how they're all going to interconnect. On the international side, Canada has the U.S. and Mexico as trading partners, so the ramifications of those risks being discussed on technology at the board level are trilateral. Everybody's going to have to buy-in and that's the biggest risk aside from cyber. How do you make the factories which produce the parts safe and operationally/technologically efficient, to go with their counterparts in the U.S. or in Canada? Whether it's automotive or electronics, part of the issue does have to come out of full stack manufacturing, but it ultimately has to come out of the OEMs and electronics. If you make technology parts and are not firmware secure, or not optimized for the vehicle that's now 3 million lines of code, then you're screwed and that's an entire industry.
Another risk I see accompanying this, which is workforce displacement. There are whole swaths of industry in 3 countries that are now being displaced by cobots and robots like Spot from Boston Dynamics, who's now able to do an entire factory floor survey in 3 days at a cost of 300K—a task that used to take 3 months and 25 bodies. Those are the risks and discussions happening at the board level. It is very vertically-specific.
By and large, security continues to dominate the conversation. That's always been my experience and I would say at Splunk, we had a very strong cast of board members with deep, technical expertise, that truly had a very good appreciation for all these security risks, etc.
Conversations with board members behind the scene are the most important to have though. You need to have advocates for IT behind the scene, not necessarily in the board meeting itself but in those offline conversations.
I agree. Not every conversation has to happen before a committee, there are other forums. It doesn't always have to be during the full board meeting. And the minute security's part of the conversation, that ends up dominating.
I think for almost all of my boards, security is the primary technology conversation but it's a conversation that the board is uniquely ill-equipped to deal with. They have very little understanding. It's worse than what it was 15 years ago, when you'd have board members reading those airline magazines and then coming up with brilliant IT strategies that they bring to the CIO. Like, "We should get Blackberries in this company," or something like that. They read the Wall Street Journal and see all the impact but they have no idea how to govern this.
Digital transformation, remote work, cloud and security