Five consequences of not having a CIO on the board

Some posts ago I wrote about the same topic. However, the more inside I try to navigate within organizations the more reasons I find to talk about this topic. This is why I decide to write again about this, although this time I will turn the way of expose and instead of present:  “The seven reasons to have your CIO on the board” as the title of the previous post, now I will say: “Five consequences of not having a top IT executive in your organizations”. 

If you are close to companies, much as you can know the internal structure, you should agree with the idea that for the most of the organizations the IT necessities cropped up suddenly and as they consider it as something necessary, but not an opportunity to take advantage. They handled IT with the minimum resources, delegating this area to low levels and approving only small projects and having a bunch of advices from external consultants from time to time. But when the business has demanded grow and grow to the IT departments they were unable to cover the demand, then some business areas started to create their own IT small group. This situation still remains very often and even knowing a lot more about the consequences only a few have been able to make the right decisions.

IT continues, in a large number of companies, been a second level decision factor and of course handled by a second level managers or executives (from the point of view of the decision level nothing about personal capacity).

There are a lot of bad consequences of not to have an IT professional on the top level of your organization and the most of them are related to loss of opportunities and capacity but others are creating an over cost and less effective process and ways of working: 

1.  Not having a strong head to design an IT strategy for the whole company, each other manager of business makes their own decisions to cover their own necessities, additionally IT is an attractive area which everybody likes and feels able to do their own battle. 
2. With different decisions makers, we have different environments, usually with redundant tools for doing almost the same function with means double cost. 
3. Islands of technology means a lot of problems to interact between departments, and to solve it, more partial and limited solutions are created. The whole strategy of the company could be affected. 
4. Several solutions coming from different points of starting, usually means a large number of applications with total different technology, appearance, way of access and credentials, the environment becomes complex and the final users of this are completely lose for reaching what they need. 
5. The new era of the digitalization will not allow this complexity, all of us should be able to adapt our ways of working to standards faster than we never did.