Your chief executive may be able to sniff out a new business opportunity from a thousand paces, but odds are they probably do not know their IP from their HTTP, or their Java from their HTML.

And why should they? That is the IT director’s job. But it is also IT’s job to make the chief executive understand the impact and opportunities of technology for the business. If you have the chief executives on your side and educated about IT, your working life and the business as a whole will be healthier and happier.

But you can only begin to educate and influence the chief executive if you actually get to meet them. Gartner research suggests that very few chief executives meet their chief information officer (CIO) more than five times a year. The analyst warns in its CIO Resolutions of 2006 report ‘that a business cannot effectively be managed with so little leadership attention directed at IT,’ and calls for CIOs to manage communication with the board more proactively.

‘If your IT director is not on the executive team, then access can be an issue and all that happens it they are reactive all the time. So the key thing is to get to that top table,’ says Mark Williamson, managing director of Diagonal Consulting.

But do not wait for an invitation to the board or for the chief executive to seek out your opinion; it is up to you to take ownership of the relationship.

Talk the talk

Business leaders want you to tell them what they want to hear. Techie talk acts like a sedative. Canny CIOs know that to grab the chief executive’s attention they need to be fluent in business-speak, piquing their interest with improved customer service and revenue increases rather than blathering on about reduced network downtime.

‘The chief executive tends to value his or her team if they are talking the same language and focused on the same issues,’ says Williamson.

It is a case of business first, business always and not a single three-letter acronym shall pass your lips. David Taylor, author of The Naked Leader and a former IT director, says: ‘If you are trying to influence me, never ever call me a user. There’s only one use for that word – drugs.’

But to get your chief executive to take IT seriously, you have to first earn their trust, and trust is not won overnight. The IT department must build a reputation for delivering its promises. Only when you are consistently hitting targets will you earn the right to be taken seriously. You can do that quickly with a few high-profile, but easy to implement, projects to impress people with your department’s prowess.

And the old cliché is true - perception is reality.

‘It’s not what you do, but what people think you do that’s important,’ says Taylor. ‘We in IT seem very poor at selling what we do well.’

So show off about the successes and emphasise how they helped the business.

‘The number one piece of advice to any CIO is that people buy from people, so you must form trusted, close working relationships with peers and your chief executive,’ says Taylor. ‘If you’re listened to, then your department will be listened to.’

Ultimately, that comes down to how good your personal relationship is with the boss. ‘One guy said to me: “I can’t stand my chief executive, but I want to go on the board, what should I do?” I said he should resign,’ says Taylor.

‘Everything starts and stops with the personal relationship. This is the great irony of being a CIO. If you’re a finance director people might be interested in qualifications, but the question everyone asks about the CIO is, what’s he like? A CIO’s success comes down to what the chief executive and others think of him.’

Win friends and influence people

CIOs should seek allies elsewhere in the business. With the human resources (HR) director on your side, both pushing the benefits of self-service HR systems, it will have twice the impact and is not going to look as if you are merely pursuing pet projects.

Roger Neal, CIO of Duncan Regional Hospital in the US feels he has earned the trust of his chief executive. ‘We’ve built up trust over the last three years. He understands that he’s not a technical person and there’s a good enough relationship that he can say when he doesn’t understand something,’ says Neal.

But not all business leaders are comfortable with showing their lack of understanding. ‘If you had a chief executive who was non-technical but would never tell you that for the reason that “I’m the boss and I know everything,” then you just have to keep on communicating,’ says Neal.

Rather than death by PowerPoint, the best way to make people support new initiatives is to involve them. Take them to see the technology in action at other organisations or ask them to act as guinea pigs. This strategy worked for Neal when he wanted to convince the board to ditch desktop PCs in favour of PC blades at extra cost.

‘We let our executive team run on blades for a month to help test them, and just to get them comfortable with the technology and see how it worked. They liked the fact they didn’t have stuff hanging off their desk, and in fact they like it so much that when we went back in, it was a much easier sell,’ says Neal.

Everyone claims to be an IT expert these days, but a little knowledge can be a bad, and dangerous, thing. ‘Every company has “airline IT people”,’ says Neal. ‘They read an article on a flight and all of sudden they think they are an expert.’

If this airline techie happens to be the chief executive, it could cause problems if you do not have a strong enough bond to stand up to them. It is up to the CIO to brief them about technology or industry changes that they should know about.

But even the most IT-phobic executives will pick up snippets from peers or at networking events. And if he or she comes back wanting to know why the company is not saving money using whatever his friends are using, you will need a good answer.

‘It’s important for the IT director to make the chief executive aware of industry issues and help in other conversations people have with them,’ says Williamson.

And the reward for all this hard work? ‘It’s to educate your chief executive to keep out of your way,’ says Taylor.

Case study: John Lewis

Kevin Berry, CIO at John Lewis, believes it is part of the job to take the bits and bytes out of any conversation about technology, but warns not to dumb things down too far.

‘Part of the IT director role is to protect the chief executive and rest of the board from horrible IT details, but you don’t want to protect them so much that they don’t know what to do,’ says Berry. ‘It places you on horns of a dilemma - I don’t try to make my colleagues understand IT, but to appreciate it.’

But the chief executive will only appreciate what IT does for the business, if the CIO has gained their trust first. The only way to do that is create an indisputable back-catalogue of successes.

‘You must build up a track record of projects, so I always try to under-promise and over-deliver. You mustn’t become a “yes” man. It’s no good saying a project is OK when it’s not; it’s better to come clean. It’s a cliché, but honesty is the best policy. Once you’ve built a level of trust operationally, then you have the right to push back to the business,’ says Berry.

He suggests presenting a portfolio of projects, some of which may be quick and easy from an IT point of view, but high-profile to the rest of the business.

Berry takes a show rather than tell approach to educating his chief executive, setting up site visits to see technology in action in John Lewis and at other retailers.

‘I also constantly ask my boss if there’s anything he wants to know about IT, or if there’s anything that’s been talked about in any of the circles he moves in that he wants to know about,’ says Berry.

This open relationship is made easier because Berry sits on the board and because working in an open-plan office means he can actually see his boss from his desk.

The fact that his current boss has a positive outlook on technology helps too, but in the past he has worked for chief executives who thought of IT as ‘a necessary evil’. The only way around that is to keep plugging away at gaining their trust.

But get it right and the rewards can be immense.

‘Business gets the IT it deserves,’ says Berry. ‘If it has clear priorities then a good IT function can latch onto that. John Lewis is a company is very clear about what it wants to do.’

Best practice: How to educate your chief executive

• Stop talking about ‘the business’ as if it’s a separate entity. It is not a case of ‘us and them’, so do not artificially create a barrier.

• Stop being a cost centre and start being a profit centre. Do this by prioritising projects and creating a tangible benefits story for each one.

• Be a ‘glass half-full person’. The tendency is for IT people to look for problems and to complain instead of shouting about their victories.

• Focus on what technology does, not what it is.

(Source: David Taylor, author of The Naked Leader)

• Arrange selective site visits for to organisations to see how technology is being applied at the coalface.

• Obtain support from your peers, so that when you approach the chief executive it does not seem as if you are trying to push through a pet project.

• Organise introduction or sharing sessions with other more technology-literate chief executive, who can extol the virtues of IT.

• Use a variety of communication methods. If you recognise that your chief executive thinks in pictures, use that method to explain business ideas.

(Source: management consultancy Quedis)