Equilar Institute

Applying Technology in the Boardroom

An Interview with Carrie Johnson, Chief Research Officer at Forrester

---

As Chief Research Officer, Carrie Johnson leads a global research organization responsible for creating powerful ideas and objective, courageous, and relevant content that helps Forrester’s clients win, serve and retain customers.

Prior to this role, Ms. Johnson held various research positions in Forrester’s research organization over the past 20 years, including SVP of research and group director for the eBusiness and channel strategy and B2B marketing roles. As an analyst before that, Ms. Johnson researched the dynamics and growth of online retailing. In this role, she analyzed consumers’ adoption of eCommerce, their multichannel behavior, and how retailers optimize sales to those consumers with key technologies and strategies.

Ms. Johnson’s background prior to Forrester includes work at the Harvard Business School, where she wrote case studies on Barnes & Noble, Frontgate, PlanetAll, QVC, Streamline and TV Guide. Ms. Johnson is a magna cum laude graduate of Bowdoin College.

---

More than ever, technology is playing a greater role in corporate boardrooms across America. Cyber security continues to be a hot-button topic in boardrooms today, and it is almost inevitable that any given company will face security breach at one point or another. Additionally, with the advances in technology, corporations have a great opportunity to enhance their operations and gain a competitive edge within their respective industries.

Therefore, it is of utmost importance that corporate boards stay up-to-date on the latest trends and developments in technology. C-Suite had the opportunity to sit down with Carrie Johnson, Chief Research Officer at Forrester to discuss these very trends. Johnson shared her insight on how technology may be applied in the boardroom to address customer and client needs, as well as strategies and tactics to ensure companies achieve exceptional results.

C-Suite: As the theme of this issue of C-Suite focuses on boardroom risk, what would you say is the greatest risk corporate boardrooms face today? What are some tactics and strategies companies may employ to address or mitigate these risks? How does technology come into play?

Carrie Johnson: Lack of vision into your future customers and employees and the inability to adapt to those changes are huge risks for boards. We find that boardrooms typically spend too much time analyzing the present or the short term, and not enough obsessing over current and future customer needs and determining a way of operating to adapt to those needs. Technology innovation has made consumers far more experimental and open to new experiences: In 2019, 56% of U.S. online adults say they’re always open to test-driving new brands, products and experiences; a decade prior, only 39% agreed. Without an operating model that puts customers at the center of planning, strategy, and operations, many firms will find themselves extinct.

Ditto on the employee front. The march of AI, automation and robotics will reach an inflection point that radically changes the composition and functioning of your workforce. Technologies like robotic process automation (RPA) are tangibly reducing employment in data entry and similar cubicle jobs by automating rote, predictable, manual tasks, while AI is only beginning to make its impact felt. Automation and AI will cannibalize 29% of jobs by 2030, but the automation economy will also create new jobs equivalent to 13%. For most of us, automation, AI and robotics mean our jobs will be transformed; by 2030, 80% of us will be working side by side with robots and intelligent software during our normal workday. Is your workforce able to adapt and flex as skills and working styles shift over the next 10 years? Boards can be key partners in designing and planning for change, and should be holding executives accountable for these plans.

Given your experience at Forrester, can you comment on the role that technology is playing in corporate boardrooms today and its importance? Do you anticipate that technology will have a greater influence on how corporate boards operate in the near future?

Johnson: With technology’s starring role in its impact on changing customer and employee strategies, it’s difficult to overstate its role he re and we haven’t even touched on true innovation yet. Boards also must push executives on their ability to experiment with and harness emerging technologies.

While it’s been true for some time that great firms have technology at the center of a strategy to continually deliver exceptional customer experience (CX) and operational excellence, more is needed to stay ahead of exponential tech innovation. Innovative firms will develop the ability to deliver new business results through opportunities discovered by continuously experimenting with technology—both emerging and established. These firms will reinvent the rules of business and will continue to shock and disrupt established, less agile and adaptive players. Boards play an important role here in pushing C-level executives out of their comfort zones and into the roles of disruptors.

Even if disruption or innovation isn’t in the cards for a company, you can bet that the firm will need to have software at the core of its business. Digital transformation is just a fancy term for customer innovation and operational excellence that drive financial results—the measure of a CEO’s performance. Because software fuels digital transformation, poor software capability is now a barrier to CEOs’ success—reason enough for CEOs to engage with software leaders to ensure that they align and progress. Boards can help guide this transformation, and we also believe that most firms will need at least to have at least one board member with software expertise to infuse understanding and thinking about software strategy and execution in the enterprise.

For boards, this trend towards a stakeholder model is actually a double-edged sword. On the one hand, boards might be tempted by the freedom to define accountability as they see fit. But in reality, this is a recipe for confusion. How can management teams reliably be held accountable for poor performance? When every stakeholder has “primacy,” none of them do. Everyone benefits from clear metrics, clear duties, and understandable practices, laws, rules and regulations.

What are some best practices for boards to stay ahead of the latest technology trends?

Johnson: Obviously my answer is biased here! There is so much great research on emerging technology trends and the key is to find credible sources without bias and that have a healthy dose of skepticism around shiny technology objects. I read many blogs in the technology industry but I make sure to research the person before I take their analysis at face value—are they an investor in a firm in the space that they’re touting as the next blockchain? If so, file it away as interesting but not without its bias. We’re also in a golden era of books about technology, especially AI, that can help expand everyone’s thinking on what is possible and how our physical and digital worlds will merge and evolve together.

Cybersecurity continues to be a hot-button topic of discussion across corporate America. What would you say is the greatest cybersecurity risk boardrooms face today? What are some measures boards can take to ensure that cybersecurity goals are being met?

Johnson: Let’s just assume that every major corporation will be the victim of a breach or attack. That means that being surprised by those breaches or attacks is the board’s biggest risk, not the attacks themselves. Boards should demand to understand a firm’s approach to security but also their response protocol likely threats and attacks. Forrester coined the term and now industry standard approach to security called Zero Trust, which in a nutshell assumes that threats exist inside and outside of your walls. Rather than focusing on protecting your network’s perimeter, firms should design security that wall off only the parts of net works that user groups need access to. This method limits damage and pain when—not if—attacks occur. Board members should be aware of this level of security strategy to gauge a company’s vulnerability and risk levels.

Are there any specific technology-driven strategies that companies can implement to enhance data privacy?

Johnson: The data privacy technologies that deliver the most business value for firms do three things: they help organizations: 1) understand where their data is located and identify what data is sensitive; 2) control data movement as well as introduce data-centric controls that protect the data no matter where it is located; and 3) enable least privilege access and use. Of course with the GDPR and now the advent of the California Consumer Privacy Act, companies are scrambling to bring their privacy practices up to date for compliance: Globally, only 36% of senior security decision makers say their firms are fully compliant with the GDPR, while 14% consider their firms to be partially compliant, and 21% believe their firms will be compliant within 12 months. This is a huge, glaring red flag for firms that haven’t started in on strategies for 1, 2, or 3.