| | November 20158CIOReviewTalking about change in IT is nothing new, but it feels like less has been written about the changing role of IT in the C-suite and at the board level. Since I believe we are in the midst of a new shift, I want to address the topic.For the most part, the makeup and composition of C-suites and boards defy generalization. Company size, business sector, stage and the wide breadth of talent and backgrounds, make them all unique.But if I were to generalize, I would say the trait that cuts across most C-suites (and certainly most boards) is the aversion to risk. IT has delivered many successes over the years and certainly in the last decade, but it is still often seen though this lens.If risk is the language, how can we leverage the opportunity?Change, Change, ChangeIn the 1960s, the Management Information System (MIS) manager (remember that title?) was a stranger to the big rooms like the C-suite and the board. In fact, the common habitat of MIS was in an office in the basement near the IBM mainframe.With PCs, networking and user interfaces in the late 1970s, the groundwork was laid for a fresh look at the governance role of IT as the number of computer users started to grow.By the mid-to-late 1980s, the IT executive began to emerge, MIS started giving way to IT, and our first CIOs were anointed. But the real shift in C-suites, while not yet really inviting IT to the table, began when the change to centralize IT budgets emerged and gave large amounts of control to the IT head (MIS manager or CIO, depending on how trendy the company wanted to be back then).In the 1990s, the big rooms still viewed the discussion of IT to be mainly approving the annual IT capital budget. For the most part, they did not really react much to the explosion onto the scene of little things like distributed computing, the World Wide Web or the mobile phone.Then came Y2K. The big rooms now had to deal not just with risk from IT, but By Darren Dworkin ,CIO, Cedars-Sinai Health SystemIT and the Big RoomsIN MY OPINION
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