During a February 2023 webinar hosted by ASAE’s Technology Professionals Advisory Council, a panel of CEOs shared insights on how they work with their IT leaders (e.g., CIO, CTO, vice president of IT, director of IT) to drive association value. Here’s a closer look at five qualities and responsibilities CEOs expect their IT leaders to have to drive long-term organizational success.

Be present at the strategy table. While maintaining operations is critical, the modern IT leader is much more involved in business strategy and product direction. The CEO panelists insisted that their IT leaders have a seat at the strategy table and be responsible for presenting the digital future to the CEO and the board.

These conversations are paramount to understanding what capabilities an association currently has and where the realignments to mission may be needed. Successful technology leaders effectively assess IT direction, anticipate challenges, and offer proactive recommendations based on organizational goals and KPIs.

Possess enterprise thinking skills. Exceptional IT leaders must also be enterprise thinkers. Enterprise thinking means prioritizing the organization’s goals over departmental or individual goals and collaborating with peers to lead horizontally across the organization. As enterprise thinkers, tech leaders go beyond technical expertise to identify market trends, understand member and industry partner needs, and set the strategic direction for leveraging the organization’s tech stack. They serve as champions of organizational success, bringing alignment of business and technology.

Teams should engage IT around project goals, member experience expectations, and measures of success at the onset of any new effort. 

Work backward from organizational goals. From creating a marketing campaign to helping consider new tools and technologies, IT leaders offer valuable insights to drive the success of association initiatives.

However, associations commonly engage IT leaders late in the process with an existing checklist of functional requirements. “Don’t invite IT to the table after the cake has already been baked,” said David Cade, CEO of the American Health Law Association. 

Instead, teams should engage IT around project goals, member experience expectations, and measures of success at the onset of any new effort. Bringing IT into discussions early on ensures alignment, while reducing both potential complexity and risks.

Influence a culture of change. Too often, resistance to change is rooted in fear of irrelevancy. Many employees connect their usefulness to the tasks that they manage for the organization. The enterprise technology leader should employ design thinking to identify situations where a manual and/or arduous process can be automated, while creating a feeling of importance and involvement in the realignment of duties for staff. Design thinking should become a key practice of keeping both end users and product facilitators in mind while crafting digital products and delivery.  

Optimize vendor and partner relationships. Partners play a critical role in supporting both CEO and CIO efforts. When associations share their strategic goals with partners, vendors can recommend solutions with the long-term vision in mind, warn of potential pitfalls, and share time-saving best practices and lessons learned. For small staff teams without an internal technology department, vendors also provide critical knowledge of technology in support of strategic initiatives and can serve as external validators of strategic initiatives with the board. In addition, effective vendor partnerships provide agile resources, allowing the association to quickly scale technical skill sets required for execution and the CEO and technology leader to focus on enterprise thinking.

Whether considering the impact of generative AI on an association’s business model or researching the next best technology tool to implement, conversations among the CEO and tech leader have become exponentially more important, as have the skills and strategy that IT leaders brings to the table.

Additional members of ASAE’s Technology Professionals Advisory Council also contributed to this article: Alex Mouw, CAE; Justin Burniske, MBA; Gretchen Steenstra, PMP; and Carlos Cardenas, CAE.