Each month we go in-depth into topics discussed in one of the Master B2B Boardrooms, our monthly roundtables for B2B eCommerce executives.
What we heard in the Boardrooms:
The buck stops…where?
Over the years we’ve heard about senior leadership at B2B manufacturers and distributors who have pushed back on investing in eCommerce because they believe that either their business could thrive without it, or that their customers preferred to buy from them offline, as they always had.
That view has shifted almost entirely, with just about everyone we speak to saying that eCommerce is an incredibly important initiative for the company, and they’re investing in the technology necessary to make it a profitable channel for them.
And part of this shift to eCommerce investment has often included some soul searching and the recognition that they do not have the technical knowledge they need in-house to build out the digital experience they want. So they turn outside the organization and bring in a CIO/CTO/CDO to lead the initiative, effectively handing over the reins to this new person.
Why that matters:
We hear over and over and over and over about how the success of digital initiatives rests on whether senior leadership believes in the strategy and invests in it – both in people and in technology.
But this masks one of the other requirements – that senior leadership actually educate themselves about digital technologies, an area that many who come from more traditional backgrounds find confusing and overwhelming (even those of us who come from digital backgrounds can find the terminology and piles of nonsense thrown at us by software companies to be confusing and overwhelming).
Hiring a CTO from outside the company is not “embracing the new digital channel.” It’s abdicating the challenging, difficult, ever-changing (and confusing and overwhelming) task of understanding the technologies available to you, the tradeoffs between them, and differences in strategies of how you build out a technology stack that will help the team bring your business strategy to life.
Certainly a CTO from outside the company can be an asset – someone who both understands the technology options and can serve as a consensus-builder. But in our Boardrooms this month we heard stories of senior leadership basically allowing a new CTO to have 100% control of the digital business and, because the rest of the executive team has no knowledge of digital, there are few controls on how this person operates.
This can cause significant cultural issues when an outsider is given free reign without concern for how a longstanding company has operated. As one Boardroom member said, “Even senior, senior leaders say they don’t know how to challenge our head of technology because they don’t know the tech well enough. They know it’s the wrong path, but they don’t know how to challenge it.”
What to do about it:
If you find yourself in a situation where a new tech exec in your company is acting like a bull in a china shop, you can always leave 🙂
But… well, let’s assume you don’t want to leave. Board members had two suggestions:
- Get tactical. Build relationships with people across the digital organization who are actually doing the work day-to-day. Understand what their needs are and try to make their lives better. You’re more likely to make many small improvements to digital operations than you are to be able to change how a CTO is thinking about their tech strategy broadly. As one board member said, “If you work with the right level of tactical person, you can actually make a change.”
- Be the educator to the senior team. Meet regularly with senior executives to help them understand the business impact of digital decisions. Don’t get into the details of the technology, focus instead on what they’re thinking about – how do we execute on the strategy we’ve developed. Walk them through the technology decisions and how each decision will impact their ability to execute on the strategy. We’ll be honest – it takes time to build trust and rapport. But as one board member said, “Our (CEO) now realizes if we can do digital right, we’ll have a huge advantage in the industry, so the exec team is now really invested in digital. It took convincing, but I’m fully supported.”
