IT Readiness – The New Board Imperative

As more businesses shift to digital, enterprises are realizing just how valuable this transformation is to set them up for success. It makes sense — digital systems and processes are now commonplace, rendering overflowing server rooms obsolete. With the pandemic accelerating the need for digital operations to maintain business, we’re seeing all companies turn into tech companies and the role of technology expand beyond IT teams.  

An outage can leave an organization extremely vulnerable and unable to operate, bringing business to a halt. If we look at the big outages of last year — Meta and AWS — it is even more apparent how downtime can paralyze a company. Notably, according to reports, these outages were not caused by external threats like we’ve seen with countless cyber-attacks. Instead they were triggered by simple — and avoidable — maintenance procedures that were not implemented or followed, and as a result, thousands of their clients were crippled as well. From this, it is evident continuity and resiliency have a more important role that expands beyond the responsibility of IT or the CIO — one that reaches as high as the board level as a priority to address.  

With technology as the power cord of today’s businesses, CEOs and board members must be able to express confidence in their IT systems. To meet this imperative, they need an objective and critical understanding of whether their company is ready to meet the challenges that can arise as more tools, processes, and work is conducted digitally. Companies need a roadmap —  a starting point if you will — to self-assess their IT readiness.  

This need has inspired us at LogicMonitor to pioneer that roadmap with our IT Readiness Assessment, which consists of 40 KPIs to give companies a framework for taking an honest look at how their enterprise is functioning. We’ve created this framework to begin discussions that can highlight pain points, raise awareness on enterprise preparedness, and to educate C-suite executives and board members who previously may have been more hands-off with IT. This self-assessment provides a gut check on the health of an organization, offering insights for further discussions with board members and C-suite executives.  

 The 40 KPIs included in the assessment fall into seven criteria groups which serve as pillars of self-examination for CIOs and IT Ops to gauge the health of their infrastructure: 

•  Visibility: Understanding what is going on in the IT landscape 
• Recovery: The ability to continue operations despite disruptions 
• Trust: Confidence in technology systems and personnel 
• Experience: Delivery of a positive and effective user experience  
• Consistency: Ability of the technology stack to reliably perform to expectations 
• Innovation: Ability of IT teams to bring innovations to the larger business 
• Human Factor: Understanding the motivation and empowerment of the people behind technology 

 We feel the responsibility of IT readiness needs greater awareness and recognition so organizations can confidently answer the question: “Are we ready for the worst? Are the right plans in place? Do we have the right people? Are we prepared?” It starts with IT but doesn’t end there. The more knowledgeable you — the CIOs and IT professionals — are in your business’ readiness, the more equipped board members and C-suite executives will be also. It’s essential to self-examine and start this dialogue before it’s too late, or before your CEO and board take a readiness health-check on IT with third parties. Don’t wait! Make IT readiness a pillar of your organization’s IT strategy.