The 2 skills the CIO of IBM's Red Hat says tech chiefs need to develop right now to combat employee resistance to digital overhauls

Red Hat

Mike Kelly is the chief information officer at Red Hat.

• Chief information officers are gaining visibility like never before due to new digital overhauls underway across corporate America.
• But those efforts mean that tech chiefs increasingly need to have a more intimate understanding of the business.
• To succeed in the expanded role, CIOs need need to use that knowledge to build influence internally, according to Red Hat's Mike Kelly.
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Tech chiefs are increasingly required to shoulder more responsibilities as their jobs shift from a traditionally back-office role to leading enterprise-wide digital upgrade initiatives.

It's giving chief information officers more visibility within the C-suite and among rank-and-file employees. But the greater cross-departmental coordination required for successful transformations means that CIOs need to get better at speaking the language of the business and have a better grasp of the firm's overall strategy - specifically how new technology like artificial intelligence and cloud computing will help meet those objectives.

Tech chiefs have "to be the ultimate connector and communicator in a company. They have to be that person that can make connection points that others can't see," Red Hat CIO Mike Kelly told Business Insider.

Succeeding at that is no easy task and requires business expertise that many CIOs who rose through the ranks before the advent of the digital age might not have, or might not be used to employing, in their daily jobs.

Kelly - who served as the information chief at pharmaceutical giant McKesson Corporation before joining Red Hat - outlined the two skills that CIOs need to develop now to navigate the new responsibilities of the role.

'Know every quarter of how the business works'

Historically the IT department was siloed from the rest of the organization. But as the role expands beyond responsibilities like network security, the team is emerging from the shadows and becoming a central part of the overall enterprise.

CIOs need to know how new tech enables the company to meet revenue or operational goals. And that means they must have an intimate knowledge of all aspects of the corporation.

"They should know every quarter of how the business works," Kelly said. The competitive landscape, how the company makes money, the major threats, "all those things have to be known. And that gives you that credibility and that trust."

Once someone has that knowledge, it becomes much easier to work across silos and get buy-in from employees in other departments because the CIO is able to connect the adoption of new technology directly to a sector's strategy or goals.

Build trust and find your advocates

When CIOs were regulated to largely back-office tasks, there was little need to build up trust outside of the IT team. As they pivot to lead sweeping digital initiatives, tech chiefs must now be able to exert influence across the company to ensure projects succeed.

Often times, it can be managers and other senior members of teams that are the biggest roadblocks to tech overhauls.

To build support, CIOs and other leaders need to find advocates that can push coworkers to adopt new digital tools. But key to bringing those individuals on as internal evangelists requires an understanding that not everyone has the same level of tech knowledge, Kelly said.

"You can jam software in, but [if] people don't know how to use it and you haven't laid out a view of what their lives are going to be like after an implementation" you won't be as successful, he said.

Developing that level of empathy doesn't happen overnight. It requires a strong understanding of the enterprise and the needs of each individual business unit - as well as how they will be effected by the adoption of new tech.

Companies, for example, are increasingly accelerating their pace of tech adoption. But CIOs need to be aware of how that speed will ripple through the organization.

That happened to Kelly when Red Hat was weighing a large system implementation. While the company was "technically ready" for it, the "timing of the release and competing priorities would result in a terrible associate experience, so we delayed the roll-out to a more acceptable timeline," he said.

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