Digital frontier: A technology deficit in the boardroom

As part of its Boardroom Frontier series, in early 2022 the Deloitte Global Boardroom Program surveyed more than 500 directors and C-suite executives and spoke to leaders, directors, and subject matter specialists to find out what’s being done in boardrooms around the world when it comes to technology. Are boards stepping up to meet the new demands of expanded technology use? What are they doing to ensure that technology investments are linked to strategic objectives?

Digital and advanced technologies, such as cloud and artificial intelligence (AI), the proliferation of cyber attacks over the past two years and growing needs to protect data are top of mind for boards. Overall, the survey revealed a gap between the growing demand for more tech understanding and engagement and what’s currently being provided by boards.

Key findings for the EMEA region include:

• Embracing technology to lead to a competitive advantage and overcoming the challenge of demonstrating how technology enables growth.
• When asked how board directors and C-suite (CxO) respondents felt about their organization’s progress in embracing technology to achieve competitive advantage, 62% of board and CxO in EMEA said yes, while 23% said no and 15% were not sure.
• The bigger challenge is to actually demonstrate how technology enables growth. Here, nearly half of the respondents from EMEA (48%) said their biggest challenge is being able to demonstrate the cause and effect between technology investments and growth. Further, one in four board directors and C-suite respondents from EMEA say their biggest barrier to figuring out the ROI of these investments is their organization’s fragmented reporting and use of separate key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics to assess outcomes.