For any business owner that lacks experience with technology, doesn't feel comfortable with technology, or just lacks the time to properly assess the value or the needs, it can be a very frustrating experience. Often a small business will hire someone to look after it.
That someone is typically an administrator or a junior technician that loves to play or learn about technology, but doesn't understand what the business needs or how to get it. Although it takes the burden of watching over IT from the owner, the result is that the business suffers.
In large organizations, more and more businesses are hiring Chief Information Officers. In some cases, it is just a title, but the effective ones are those that understand business, understand the business outcomes that the business is looking for and does not speak in technical terms.
This type of individual will not be attracted to a small firm, for two reasons:
- The small firm cannot afford to pay them.
- The small firm will not have enough challenge for them.
What the small business owner to do? There are three choices:
- Hire a technician? This does not help the business to take advantage of technology and grow the business
- Hire a full time CIO? He can't afford it, and probably couldn't find one who will come.
- Hire a part-time CIO? This may work for the larger firms, but could still be expensive.
- Hire a Virtual CIO? What is it?
A virtual CIO has all of the skills of the full time CIO and has a focus on the business. Instead of spending full time or part-time at your site directing your effort, the Virtual CIO brings all of the skills and knowledge to your business, providing guidance, advice, coaching and support to you and your staff, helping you to become more knowledgeable and capable. This means an affordable cost, that goes down as you learn to manage this yourselves. And it comes as "just enough" to let you choose how fast you want to work, how aggressive you want to be and how much you want to pay.
Consider this as an approach to getting the results that you want at a price that you can afford.
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3 comments:
Good article. Your right a technician has limited capabilities. What about an experienced IT manager? Couldn't that level go in part time? Why do you suggest CIO?
The question is what is an IT Manager vs a CIO? I see IT Managers managing IT, not the business. The issue is how to get business value from technology. The difference between a CIO and an IT Manager is focus. Although some CIOs are really IT Managers in disguise, the CIO role is to understand technology, but get business results.
A plug for the book "Straight to the Top, Becoming a World Class CIO" by Gregory S. Smith. One of the things that is attractive about this book is it uses a fair bit of data along with his experience as a CIO (mostly in large global companies such as the World Wildlife Fund. There are some real nuggets of gold. He talks for example about the importance of and differences in relationships with CEO's and CFO's, something I've experienced many times.
The real key here for the purpose of this discussion is can a small business benefit from someone who understands process and is aware of what needs to be done at the CIO level. There are CIOs who don't and there are IT managers that do. Titles don't tell the whole story. Based on my growing number of conversations with Marc and his passion and ability to interpret client problems and design solutions, Marc can help a lot of business owners. AND he's worked for many large companies as well as small.
The reality on the IT Manger side is that they can be anything from a glorified technician that knows very little about the business, has no budget and possibly no direct reports, and what they manage is hardware. On the other end of the scale there are IT Managers with large staffs and big budgets and projects that they must manage and they are part of strategic planning. In those cases they are trying to fill multiple roles that start to include the responsibilities of IT Directors or even CIOs. More and more I am seeing the CIO role as a global economy role.
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