Digital is no longer a side project your CIO worries about between outages. AI pilots, data-sharing partnerships, cloud migrations, and “transformation” programs are now inseparable from strategy, risk, and reputation. Yet many boards still receive slide decks that are long on aspiration and short on accountable owners, hard metrics, or ethical guard-rails.
Governing Digital with Courage and Clarity is written for directors and executives who want to move beyond buzzwords and treat digital as a core governance responsibility rather than a technical sideshow. Drawing on boardroom engagements across health, education, standards, and the for-purpose sector, it offers a practical framework for overseeing AI, data, cybersecurity, and emerging technology in a way that is both commercially disciplined and values-aligned.
What the full report covers
The full report expands substantially on the public snapshot above and provides:
- A clear role for the board in digital: setting vision and risk thresholds, defining what “good” looks like, and insisting on regular reporting across AI, data privacy, cybersecurity, and emerging-tech risk.
- Readiness checkpoints to test whether a proposal is genuinely investment-ready or still a glossy concept: roadmap, ownership, oversight, baselines, and culture.
- Five core questions every director should ask before approving a digital, AI, or analytics initiative, including data provenance, model drift and bias, total lifecycle cost (including hidden OPEX), human-judgment boundaries, and ongoing governance structures.
- Red-flag patterns that reliably signal digital trouble ahead: missing accountability, undefined data ownership, absent performance metrics, uncontrolled scope creep, and lack of ethical safeguards.
- Practical tools for directors, including:
- an Opportunity Map to surface “high-value, high-risk” processes that warrant board attention;
- a Runway Forecast aligning experiment budgets, timeframes, and liquidity;
- an Ethics Guard-Rail Table that turns abstract principles like fairness and transparency into named owners, metrics, and escalation triggers.
- Key governance signals across data quality, staffing and skills, lifecycle cost, and vendor silence—designed to help you probe beyond polished presentations and locate what is not being said.
Throughout, the report keeps a tight focus on what can realistically be done from the board table: better questions, clearer thresholds, sharper mandates, and more disciplined escalation paths.