Congratulations on getting invited to speak to your company's board of directors. This is something to prepare for carefully, especially because you have a large project you are seeking to fund. The key is to talk about the technology without talking about the technology.
What do I mean? Allow me to give you an example. One of my CIO colleagues was pitching to the NY Public Library board the first network for the library. It was a large project. There were many luminaries on the board, and the room had the largest monogony conference table he’d ever seen.
About ten minutes into the presentation, he noticed the executive's eyes glazing over with the tech-speak. So he shifted to a familiar metaphor.
"If you were building a new condo high rise," he said, "and you put in pipes that weren’t big enough, what would happen when you flushed the toilets?"
He paused for effect, and then said, "They’d back up!"
"It’s the same story with the network bandwidth we need."
He got the project approved. And for the full amount he asked for: $10M. A good metaphor, one that everyone could relate to, saved the day.
As IT leaders, we know the technology, including the latest products and acronyms. It's a foreign language to most executives. You need to be able to speak their language. That's usually means speaking in business terms. And occasionally speaking in plumbing terms. So you need to practice being chief translator. Omit the jargon. |