Ways to ward off a doomed stakeholder management strategy

While new technologies have shifted priorities, the need to manage stakeholders has not, says Krishna Prasad, CIO of technology services business UST. And with AI used in almost every part of the business, stakeholders have become much more tech savvy, reducing their dependency on IT departments. But as a result, anybody could then expose a lot of company data inadvertently. To help mitigate these risks, it’s necessary for IT leaders to increase their profile and visibility across the organization, and make sure they educate all potential users.

“As technologies evolve, CIOs still need to build mutual commitment and support for IT initiatives,” says tech consultant and author Gerald Leonard. They can’t fall into typical traps like overlooking transparent communication, failing to address the needs of remote or less-engaged stakeholders, or underestimating the influence of non-traditional stakeholders, such as employees using unapproved technology tools.

Poor stakeholder management can also lead to a lack of buy-in, miscommunication, and, ultimately, the failure of crucial initiatives. “I’ve seen projects falter when IT leaders fail to recognize non-traditional stakeholders like marketing teams using unsanctioned tools,” says Leonard. “In one case, this oversight led to a fragmented IT landscape and security vulnerabilities.”

Come out from the shadows

Sidney Fernandes, CIO for University of South Florida (USF), which has over 50,000 students, says IT leaders should embrace aspects of shadow IT, which he views as a willingness of the business to digitize. “In our strategic plan, instead of referring to it as shadow IT, we added something called client technologist enablement,” he says. “These client technologists need the tools and governance to create digital products at the speed of business.”

Since USF made it an area of focus to enable the teams working on technology outside of IT, Fernandes included a set of metrics in the strategic plan to track how much IT helps client technologists. Some things that are measured include the number and nature of components provided, like whether they’re data sets or low-code components, and the number and types of platforms and infrastructure.

These client technologists include the person who writes reports for the CFO, and people who create sophisticated databases using tools they discovered themselves. “The CIO is really worried about cybersecurity and the risk of data exfiltration,” says Fernandes. The best approach, he adds, is to give them a platform that’s useful, but also mitigates risk on a large scale while providing IT with visibility.

“Imagine you’re a client technologist of the athletics department, and you’re looking for financial information for athletics,” he says. “You shouldn’t have to come to IT to ask for those reports. Instead, we worked with our CFO and her team to create data sets that client technologists can take advantage of, while still maintaining the integrity of the data. We also built a team whose job is to enable client technologists to create apps on top of the data. By providing worthwhile tools, the IT department allows the business to respond to opportunities quickly, while at the same time mitigating risk.”

Sergey Kastukevich, deputy CTO of iGaming software development company SoftSwiss, says most organizations would like more flexibility in the decision-making processes, and IT needs to implement more agile processes that help business leaders respond to evolving circumstances. “New business opportunities arise at any time, and people have to be able to quickly purchase tools to get the job done,” he says. “Business leaders can’t wait until next year for another budget to get approved.”

Because IT can’t control things as easily as before, says Kastukevich, it needs to develop better communication skills to motivate users to adopt certain tools, and communicate with people inside the business to understand how they work, what the business processes are, what they use, and what’s required for security. “Otherwise, you’ll suggest solutions they’ll never adopt,” he says. “After all, you can tell them to use Microsoft Teams, but they may not listen if WhatsApp is more suitable.”

Kastukevich says IT leaders should also participate in conferences and seek a variety of other sources to keep up with where technology is. “You can’t ignore what’s going on in the world,” he says. “We’re now adopting instruments to make software development easier, like GitHub Copilot. I’ve been communicating with other managers and other IT leaders around the world, which has allowed me to discover some of the problems and ways of fixing them.”

Build bridges across the organization

Orla Daly, CIO of Skillsoft, a digital learning company that helps companies transform their workforces, says her organization is remote first. This has a number of benefits, but also presents challenges. “You miss out on hallway conversations when everybody is behind their desks remotely,” she says. “To compensate, you have to implement more programmatic ways to make sure people are aware of what everybody else is doing.”

According to Daly, as the lines have blurred between tech and the business, IT team members need an improved understanding of the desired business outcomes. They have to marry those outcomes to what technology can bring, and communicate that in a language the business team can understand. “That ability to communicate clearly — to influence without authority — is key, especially as we’re trying to govern a landscape that’s moving at a very fast pace,” she says.

Prasad adds that while many organizations are able to do proofs of concept using AI, most stumble when they try to take it into production. For example, it’s easy to build the capability to answer questions related to HR policies. However, before that can go into production, the AI has to be trained not only to quote policy, but to also respond in a tone that respects sensitivities in different parts of the world.

“Questions around sexual harassment, for example, have to be handled in an appropriate manner,” he says. “All of a sudden, you’re going from answering an HR policy that somebody can read and interpret in a certain way, to involving different people in the organization — HR and legal in this case — to help train the model to answer questions appropriately to the context.”

Stakeholder management has become both wider and deeper. The CIO and the IT organization need to build strong relationships with a new set of partners — and at all levels. “It’s not just me talking to the CXO,” says Prasad. “It’s also a manager or an analyst on my team being able to actively engage with their counterparts in various other operational teams.”

What Prasad expects over the next couple of years is that functional teams are going to become more tech literate. “That’s not because they understand the depths, but because the technology will get easier to use,” he says. “And we as a technology team have to understand that our role is no longer about building small apps or implementing systems like we did before. Now we need to let other teams enable themselves. IT’s role is to establish the guardrails and help people understand how systems need to work together to solve a business objective.”

IT will play more of a facilitator role, providing the underlying infrastructure, data sets, and, above all, establishing the controls. “Don’t be afraid of client technologists,” says Fernandes. “It’s my experience that they’re your biggest allies, even though they might not seem so initially. Those are the people you really want to be IT’s best friends.”