SMECIO :: Visionary I.T. leadership and effective I.T. management  

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.

Business Size
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.

"Roy has a long-term engagement with our company providing experience and expertise in independent system analysis and process improvement. He actively found ways to keep the consulting service expenses down which resulted in a longer engagement and much needed support for the new system. The consistent tips and tricks in analysis made managing the ongoing deployment much more manageable. Thanks Roy, for providing some of the best consulting services that I have ever retained!"