Do CIOs need to shout louder? A provocative piece of research from management consulting firm Oliver Wyman and the US-based National Association of Corporate Directors (NACD) suggests that their voices simply aren’t being heard in the boardroom (see image, above).

While almost all of the 204 company directors surveyed acknowledge that IT will have a significant impact on their company over the next five years, it appears that many boards do not have the skills or information they need to manage IT risk effectively.

These findings raise the question: Whose job is IT risk anyway? The study proposes a new framework for managing IT risk aimed specifically at company directors and covering four areas: competitive risk, portfolio risk, execution risk, and service and security risk. But, as the report’s authors acknowledge, few board members have extensive IT experience, with only 16% having been a CIO or senior IT executive previously.

And this is not the only recent study to suggest that CIOs’ skills and input are not sufficiently valued at board level. When research company Gartner recently conducted a survey with the Financial Executives Research Foundation, it found that “the chief financial officer is increasingly becoming the top technology investment decision-maker in many organizations.”

It may be time for a concerted effort by IT divisions to improve their self-promotion and influencer skills. After all, as even the Oliver Wyman report points out, “Companies that receive valuable direction and input on IT-related risk will have a significant competitive advantage over those that do not.”