Any company that wants to be great today must also be a great technology company. As Bill Gates once put it, information technology and business have become so interwoven that it's no longer possible to talk meaningfully about one without the other. That's exactly why technology governance and oversight deserve to be a higher board-level priority: technology isn't just critical to day-to-day execution, it's the primary lever for growth and innovation.
And yet most CEOs and boards still underinvest in technology governance. Across decades as a senior operating executive at Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon, and through stints as a startup CEO and board member, the pattern has become impossible to ignore: material operational disruptions, delayed or poorly executed technology initiatives, weak technical due diligence on acquisitions, inadequate cybersecurity, and chronic overspending on tech and tech teams. These are all symptoms of the same underlying problem — boards and executives who don't fully understand how to oversee and manage technology.
The financial frauds of the Enron era shook investor confidence badly enough to force a real strengthening of financial governance. Technology is due for the same reckoning. Boards that don't improve their technology oversight risk falling behind — or, in the worst cases, failing their fiduciary responsibilities outright.
The Real Costs of Poor Technology Governance
Technological disruption is one of the biggest threats facing companies today, and it's accelerating. AI is actively upending publicly traded companies like Chegg and WebMD, both being displaced by AI-powered alternatives. That's ultimately a management responsibility, but it's also a governance failure: a board's job is to make sure management is looking around corners and building strategies to survive disruption, and a board that doesn't understand the technology landscape can't meaningfully evaluate whether management's plans will actually work.
Operational failures tell the same story. Southwest Airlines took a nine-figure earnings hit when its crew-scheduling systems collapsed — a failure notable enough to have its own Wikipedia page. Applied Materials lost hundreds of millions in sales after a supplier's ransomware attack. UnitedHealth Group absorbed more than $3 billion in losses following the disruptive cyberattack on its Change Healthcare unit. These failures hit revenue, market value, brand, customer experience, and employee morale all at once, and they tend to recur for companies that never build a systematic, experienced approach to technology governance — particularly companies whose primary business isn't technology itself.
The Historical Undervaluation of Technology Governance
Most companies operate across four classes of assets: financial, physical, human, and technology. Boards invest real attention in the first three. Audit committees bring in financial subject-matter experts to work alongside CFOs and outside auditors; comp committees do the same with HR leadership and outside compensation experts.
Technology gets none of that structural attention. Few public company boards include a genuine technology subject-matter expert, and fewer still maintain a dedicated technology committee to oversee investments, initiatives, and leadership. CTOs, CIOs, and CISOs may present at board meetings, but rarely with anywhere near the depth or scrutiny given to sales, marketing, or finance. Most board members can read a financial statement; comparatively few have real technology literacy, and that gap persists because technology is more dynamic, more opaque, and more unfamiliar than financial or marketing literacy — not because it matters less.
Every board insists on independent audits of its financial statements and compensation practices. Very few boards have ever had their technology independently audited at all.
Moving Forward: Prioritizing Technology Governance
Relying solely on management for technology information is no more sound than relying solely on management for financial information. It's unreasonable to expect most board members, without outside help, to evaluate a system architecture, technology strategy, engineering processes, or product metrics well enough to judge whether a team or product is actually healthy.
Boards that bring in independent, outside technical expertise for a second opinion can engage far more effectively with their CTOs, CIOs, and CISOs — the same way they already engage with CFOs — and can build a genuine understanding of how technology initiatives succeed or fail, what to prioritize, and where the real risks sit within their own technology organization.
That's the core thesis behind Techquity: providing trusted, high-quality technology advice and serving as a technology co-pilot for investors, boards, and CEOs working to get this right.
Anthony Bay is CEO and co-founder at Techquity. www.techquity.ai He has previously held senior roles at Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft as well as early-stage companies, served on multiple private and public boards, and launched the world's first social network before the Internet even existed. He has led product groups, M&A, CEO, and board governance for everything from early-stage startups to large corporations.