Retained-CIO
Why a SMECIO Retained-CIO?
Businesses are founded by individuals whom are experts in their own
products or services, working along their strengths to establish a
competitive edge. In that same respect, it is from our experience that
there is a genuine vacuum in these businesses to properly harness the
strategic use of I.T. for the business.
Typically, the
executive management acknowledges the need for technology but are often
left without a choice but to allow the entire business's I.T. needs to
be handled by a single administrator, whom very often, isn't
appropriately experienced or where the administration of I.T. services
and technology isn't his/her primary role. This obviously isn't the
ideal situation for any business as it undermines the importance of
I.T. as a STRATEGIC ENABLER of BUSINESS SUCCESS and COMPETITIVENESS.
If
you find your business in a similar position, consider the SMECIO
Retained-CIO alternative where the service primarily focuses on the
following CORE differences against the traditional full-time/contract
CIO positions.
A SMECIO Retained-CIO deals with growing businesses that do not have their own I.T. departments and often may or may not have a formal I.T. staff on its monthly payroll. This means that I.T. issues are, for the most part left undiagnosed and are typically approached REACTIVELY instead of PROACTIVELY. A basic focus for the Retained-CIO is to function as an educator and enabler to teach both staff and management like the required I.T. fundamentals.
Project Scale
A SMECIO Retained-CIO must understand the scaling issues and the fundamental differences between small and large I.T. projects. An illustration would be most appropriate in this case. Imagine a requirement for backing up of data from a local workstation. In a large organization, a backup server could be easily configured and employed to backup data volumes automatically in the middle of the night. However, in a small and medium enterprise, this simply maybe an overkill and may just cost too much. A lower-tech alternative of deploying portable hard disk drives and a simple backup schedule might better suit the requirement and operating expense.
Prioritization
A SMECIO Retained-CIO must understand that SME I.T. priorities can be significantly different from those of larger organizations. For a large organization that does its business via the web, the Internet infrastructure of the organization maybe considered as mission critical as down time means lost revenue. For a smaller organization, down time usually just means decreased efficiency. So, the priority should be on driving growth rather than on ensuring 100% network up-time.