Board Oversight Of Digital Transformation Risks — Alexandra Morehouse
While the world worked on containing the pandemic, businesses and companies tried to focus on their survival and continuity. To grow in a post covid-world, swift digital transformation is vital.
Alexandra Morehouse, a highly effective transformation strategist and risk management influencer was interviewed by Howard Brod Brownstein for the Women in the Boardroom Podcast. They discussed what boards need to know regarding digital transformation risks in a post covid world.
“Every one of these transformations had a tech stack behind it.
“Two of the risks that you have to address technically when you are putting things out to bid is the choice between some of newer startups who are dramatically cheaper and some of the usual suspects who are very solid and are more expensive. Thus, boards have to be really alert to the risk regarding the vendor choices because there are some tremendous startups out there which many times are using you to write new code that may have some pickups in it. This is risk one.
“The other risk is on the internal side. For example, in Banner, we had to land data from 140 legacy systems. So there’s risk in that because if any one of those goes down as a result of it, there is disruption to the business. Thus, understanding what the disruption risks would be to the business and then of course the change management is crucial. There are risks to actually paying for the digital transformation and then not having it adopted which must be considered as well.
“Our board of directors at Banner had to put physician adoption of online scheduling into their compensation plan to make them do it. Most of the people would much rather have their front office schedule for them than doing it online and they basically in acts of civil disobedience stayed away. So, we had to factor in their comp committee into their comp plans. These are the kinds of risks — risk of vendors, risks in your back-end legacy systems and interruptions to existing processes and then the risks in change management.”
More about Alexandra: Alexandra Morehouse is a mission-driven collaborator and seasoned board member, with deep experience in governance, risk management, and digital transformation. She currently serves as the chief digital officer and chief marketing officer for Banner Health and is a national thought leader in diversity, equity, and inclusion.
