CIO Executive Council — I cannot tell you how many times I’ve heard CIOs say that they need to educate the executive committee about the value of IT. While I tend to nod and agree, the idea has always struck me as odd.

First, most business executives are not babbling morons; they should not need to be spoon fed information on any topic critical to their business. Second, the ability to educate is a hard-won skill; CIOs may be able to communicate—to write and talk and get an idea across—but they are not educators, a challenging role practiced by degreed academic professionals.

So I set out to understand why this notion of education persists and how a cross section of successful CIOs interprets the concept.

“Education is the wrong word,” says Ellen Shepard, CIO of Teach for America. “Rather than worry about educating the business, CIOs should spend their time learning business strategy and how to enable that strategy through IT. The more you deliver, the less you need to educate.”

Raj Kushwaha, CIO of Zimmer Holdings (ZMH), agrees. “As CIO, you do not want to be in the position of educating your peers,” he says. “If you are doing your job, you are not educating them; you are having strategic conversations about the business, with just a small percentage of that conversation about technology.”

Once again, CIOs are facing a contradiction. What are the keys to escaping this education paradox?

Rely on your relationship managers. “If I try to handle all of the communication to my executive team myself, we will fail,” says Tom Bauer, CIO of Allianz Life. “The communication that takes place one and two levels down is much more important.” Bauer established a team of business-relationship managers in IT, each responsible for strategy and delivery to a specific segment of the business. With this team in place, “all that positive energy bubbles up to the executive level, which gives me the credibility to have more strategic conversations,” says Bauer.

Build a steering committee one level down. Shepard also believes in taking a bottom-up approach. “As CIO, I have always established an enterprise IT steering committee made up of leaders one level down,” she says. “If you want to improve IT delivery, you need to focus where the operational experience really is.” To ensure the group comes together as an enterprise, and not just as a collection of silos looking out for their own needs, Shepard suggests developing a set of rewards for cross-enterprise success.

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