8 Types Of Statistics You Need For Your Next Board Meeting
Organisations tend to push IT proposals aside, often in favour of departments that can provide more tangible results. Yet the health of the IT infrastructure is an important building block of a successful organisation. This is the key takeaway that your board of directors should understand when you finish presenting your IT proposal in a board meeting. Statistics can help you achieve this.
If you’re wondering how to make your IT proposal more influential and get everyone on board (pun intended) with it, here are eight useful tips about proposal statistics that will help you.
#1 Make Statistics Relevant
Statistics provide an in-depth look at the current state of affairs and are a good starting point to showcase just how your solution can make it better. Back up every statement you make when presenting your IT proposal with statistical data: detail your current operations and IT structure, highlight the current issue, and present supporting evidence and figures.
If you wish to implement new security solutions to the whole IT framework, explain what’s wrong with the current setup. For example, you have a significant amount of unstructured data that makes it hard to analyse and monitor everything. Show them statistics on how businesses without centralised data have a hard time protecting it.
#2 Statistics Provide A Fuller Picture
Staying ahead of your competitors is intertwined with staying on top of the latest technological trends, and it’s hard to keep up if you’re not an IT professional.
This is why you shouldn’t stop at statistics about improving security and business operations in your organisation. Give the board statistics that highlight a full picture of how your IT solutions will affect their position on the market. How will they strengthen it? Will they shift power levels compared to the competitors?
#3 Use Their Point Of View – What Metrics Matter The Most?
This is the basic “what’s in it for me?” question. What is the most important thing to them? To make sure the organisation remains profitable. How does your proposal help with that?
Avoid being overly technical: explain how your proposed IT solution works, and then focus on benefits. Expect a “why fix if it ain’t broken” remark along the way, and prepare your statistics accordingly.
For example, why would you invest in additional security measures if you’ve never had a security breach? You have to explain that data breaches have to be detected, and without the right solution, it’s very hard to determine whether your data is being leaked or not. The latest example of Marriot shows that it can go on for years before being discovered.
Statistics from other organisations showing losses, the business impact, and the true cost of a threat can be the numbers that the board needs to see what they could be exposing themselves to.
#4 Prepare Data-Driven Answers To Their Pain Points
Prepare answers for the biggest pain points of implementing new IT solutions: downtime, costs, and the risks of not implementing the solutions you suggest.
For some businesses, downtime is just not acceptable in any shape or form. To get them on board with your idea even if downtime is required, explain how much it would cost to do nothing in the long run.
Prepare statistical data on the costs of implementation and switching to a new system vs. costs of continuing using the old system over the course of five years, and present long-term outcomes.
You might want to invest in a system that can give you real-time statistics for such scenarios. When they see the numbers in real-time, it will be easier to convince them.
#5 Alignment On Goals Is The Most Important Thing
It all boils down to whether your proposal aligns with the business goals. Find out which goals are most important, and then you can provide relevant statistics on how the implementation of your solution helps achieve those goals faster.
#6 Show Them Numbers On Disruptive Technology
New and better ways of doing things pop up almost every day, and it’s hard to keep up without investing in new solutions. Emphasise that those solutions are now cloud-based, which brings costs down considerably when compared to traditional in-house settings.
This also makes them highly adaptable to your needs – if you need to scale up, they will scale up; if you need to take it down a notch, you can do that too, and the pricing will follow accordingly.
This gives the company the much-needed agility to quickly respond to shifts in business environments.
#7 Present Opportunities
Follow up by quantifying the benefits of implementing your solution, for example, how much better security, lower costs, by how much? , quick adaptation to changes, how quick?, faster and less disruptive security updates, and so on.
#8 Also Mention Dangers
Explain that your solution doesn’t come without risks. List those risks, as well as ballpark numbers on the likelihood that they happen, and present backup plans for each.
Statistics are one of the best ways on how to make your IT proposal more influential and help you ace your board meeting.
TheBoardishTeam
