With widespread consensus on the need for organisations to fully and actively embrace digital transformation, the focus of the conversation is moving from why that journey is needed to how to actually start it and keep everything on track throughout.

A common source of inspiration and knowledge, examples of successful digital transformation cases (and failed ones as well) are extremely useful, but important as it is to keep benchmarking other organisations within and outside one’s industry, many organisations are still struggling to figure out how to go about their own digital transformation journey and ensure the process is not cut short by a lack of real board level commitment.

In reality, although IT is a major contributing factor to the creation of business value, it is still common to find boards that perceive it as more operational than strategic issue. Consequently, these boards will not be as involved in IT-related strategic decision-making or as in control as they should be. As long as the board's main concerns, conversations and oversight remain solely focused on the financial and legal issues, digital transformation will be hindered and never realise its full potential. However, for those who recognize the strategic role of IT and the way it can become a competitiveness driver or barrier, there is a pressing need to start taking up accountability for governing digital assets at board level.

The Board-level Dashboard for Digital Strategy and Oversight

In order to understand the reality pertaining to the board accountability in digital asset governance, the University of Antwerp - Antwerp Management School, CEGEKA, KPMG Belgium and Samsung Belgium co-created an extensive research program on the role of the board in IT governance. One of the outcomes from this research was a solution that will help boards take up their accountability regarding IT governance: a board-level dashboard to measure the performance of the IT governance system within the organisation.

More than a mere theoretical solution, this dashboard is a flexible and easy to implement tool based on research findings, but also validated and enriched by several current board members to ensure its relevance. With this tool, boards will be able to evaluate if their board level IT governance approach is properly implemented, if it is generating the expected outcomes and how it can be improved.

The Dashboard explained

The dashboard is built on four interlinked perspectives that connect what boards should do to ensure digital strategy and oversight to what they can expect from those actions, as illustrated in the image bellow. For each perspective, a mission, more specific objectives and metrics are defined and all these items can be customised to better fit the IT governance approach of each organisation. On top of that, this dashboard can also be extended so as to include more information at the objectives and/or metrics levels.

Check out and download the complete toolkit:

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