Get Some of Your Time Back

Insights for leaders navigating a digital world.

Welcome to Leading Digital - a three minute read designed to help you ask better questions, make smarter tech decisions, and lead with confidence in today's digital environment.

Get Some of Your Time Back

One of the symptoms I see in organisations that have a low level of Digital Capability Maturity (see previous post to learn more about that) is that it takes a long time to make technology decisions. The amount of time this chews up for leadership teams slowly sneaks up over time. While the debate bounces around, team members often begin to resent the lack of clarity, and sometimes begin to fill the leadership void by making their own decisions on the matter.

Often organisations without a CIO or CTO end up here because no one owns decisions on technology at the leaderhsip level. In larger organisations it can be a symptom of a lack of maturity in the analysis of technology risk and opportunity, or a misalignment between technology and business leaders about the role of technology in reaching organisational goals. AI tools is where I see this playing out most often recently.

Teams that have done the hardwork on strategy and alignment up front can avoid this morass because they have clear decision making frameworks - who can decide at different levels of impact, risk, and spend - and principles for how technology supports their mission - maybe they want to be the best digital experience in their sector, or are aiming for the simplest possible tech environment to keep maintenance costs low. These teams can act quickly and decisively, are better able to experiment within those guardrails, can delegate decisions for some items, and spend much less of their precious time thinking about it!

When leadership teams get stuck on a technology decision and don't yet have a framework for this, it can be helpful to do a quick reframe of the decision. I've shared some questions below that you can use to do just that.

Leaders have been asking...

Asking great questions is a leadership skill you already have. Here's some questions you can ask to better understand the role of technology for your own organisation.

This time all of the questions are for the leadership team. These are designed to break you out of a tech decision deadlock and move the conversation forward.

"Is this a technology decision or a business decision? What impact could it have on moving us towards short and long term goals?"

"Do we understand the risks and opportunities here? Do we need outside input, or are there case studies from our industry available?

"What is the first step forward we could take? Is there an opportunity to do a low cost experiment to see if this will really meet the need?"

For the really tough ones, remember that most technology decisions don't need to be 'all in' - look for ways to test things out at a lower risk, scope, and cost, then come back with more information from your unique context. The most important thing is not to stagnate on a decision for too long, it will drain your energy and it won't do you any favours down the road.

Take action!

This fortnight, get on the front foot for future decisions. Consider what would happen if you needed to make a major decision about technology today - maybe changing vendors for a core business system, or automating part of a major function. Imagine a member of your team has brought you a proposal for this work. How would you evaluate it? Who would need to be involved in the decision? Who would have to sign it off? How long would it take?

If it's not clear today how that would work, or if thinking about how long it would take makes your eyes water, it's worth looking at how developing clear decision making processes and guidelines around technology could benefit your organisation.

Don't let tech decisions eat up your time - leadership teams who are aligned on the 'so what' of technology in their organisation can benefit from faster decision cycles. If you can hash out the guiding principles as a leadership team you won't have to keep having that conversation in the guise of each new technology decision.

I'll be back in your inbox next fortnight with more on digital leadership.

Scarlett