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Illuminating the black box: why CIOs should consider publishing an annual IT report
Also consider sharing a bit about how your organization makes decisions, how it chooses work, and how much to invest and where. If your IT organization has a team dedicated to Finance, consider handing them the mic. They can speak generally about how the budget is allocated (you’d be surprised by the number of people this interests) and, if appropriate, even furnish evidence that revenues have outpaced IT’s budget—that is, they can show evidence of scale. Few metrics provide a fairer judgment of IT, given how inseparable its contributions are from the unnumbered activities of other departments. Still, even if you can’t yet show these trends, you’ll assuage many of your audience’s concerns and earn a great deal of their respect simply by showing a little transparency.
Digital Outlook
As its name suggests, the Digital Outlook should convey IT’s conception of the company’s digital future and of how that future will be brought to bear. What investments will fuel it? What projects will drive it? What technologies will define it? Here engage your audience by connecting the department’s plans to the technologies and advancements they’ve learned about at home from the news or their favorite podcast—AI or blockchain, or a new revenue model.
The Outlook also invites you to elaborate on how your teams and the company stay abreast of the latest technological advancements, and how it participates in the industry more broadly. Do you partner with VCs to scout emerging technologies? What’s that experience like? Tell your people about it. Tell them what you discovered and how you expect it will enhance their experience.
A beautiful thing about this section is that you needn’t know all the details about how a technology will be deployed or how it will contribute to your firm. You don’t even need to know whether it will work. Discuss your experiments freely, since that’s all they are: experiments. Just bring your audience along for the ride.
Finishing flourishes
By writing these sections, you’ll gather the content you need to write to others should you choose to include them.
One is a letter from the CIO, which should resemble those by CEOs in annual reports such as 10ks. It should open your report and preview the content, perhaps spotlighting the department’s most earthshaking achievements, if for no other reason than to ensure they’re relayed to those who wouldn’t read past the first page even if the report were written by Hemingway. It should also affect a voice warmer and more personal than the rest of the report, which, though clear and simple, should otherwise cede attention to its content.
The second is a glossary or an appendix. Here you can define or elaborate on terms and concepts that might otherwise disrupt your readers’ experience.
Forward looking
Aside from controlling your own narrative, there’s another reason to start publishing IT annual reports: With time, more of their content will become mandatory. Such has been the pattern of history.
Just this year the SEC announced that it would require companies to disclose through form 8-K information related to cybersecurity incidents, and to annually provide information regarding cybersecurity risk posture, strategy, and governance. (See? More people care about it than you thought.) Point is, digital reports will prove more than a fad. The black box will brighten to become a glass box. And for you, that’s an opportunity. Not only can such reports help you spread the good word about your department, they might even help you, more than anyone, learn how all those pieces you oversee add up to something more than the sum of their parts. After all, writing, they say, is refined thinking.
