Apart from security, what IT topics really grab the board's attention?

Digital transformation, hybrid cloud, collaboration and remote work

At my company, the technology conversation is the focus at the board level. There's a transformation conversation but it's about business model transformation and they view IT as something operational as long as no one's telling them, "I'm not getting it done, because Sharon's not delivering the IT stuff." 

We've got a lot of technologists, including a board member from Salesforce who ran platforms. We have a lot of people who understand IT's importance there and I don't think they're spending a lot of time on that. They assume it's getting done through talking, but they’re scared shitless over security, especially because security is part of our brand. It's mostly the audit committee that is concerned with IT's digital transformation initiatives and the audit committee are mostly finance people. We have a CIO in the audit committee, from the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association (TIAA) who asks all the hard questions and that is the conversation they want to have with me.

Digital disruption is always a fun talking point

The few boards that I'm on are realizing that technology business continuity, and that not every outage or technology risk is a security risk. We all have actually seen it happen recently: where somebody hits the wrong button and now AWS or SFDC has a problem, things are down.

I have noticed that whether they're prepared to have the conversations or not, this enterprise risk list is beyond just cyber. Now the concern is, "If my business is about delivering services and those services are down, what does that mean, from an enterprise risk perspective?" Along with these systems that can scale, etc. If you've got the right board make-up, there are more threads being pulled around some of these other risks because until now there hasn't been a clear understanding that things don't just magically work all the time.

If it's not about security, then it really depends on the company and where they're at. Digital strategy is different for every company, so their digital issues are different. For UKG, their biggest issue isn’t an IT issue, it's a product issue: What's the product going to be and how are we going to do cloud operations with the infrastructure, once that's figured out from a business perspective?

For World 50, it's the digitization of their business: how do they translate their experiences, which have been thrust into an online-only universe in the last 12 months, and how do they continue to drive that forward in a hybrid universe? So I don't see a common theme, but everybody's investing in technology in some form. Very few companies that I'm working with don't care about it.