Can a small business afford a Chief Information Officer (CIO)?

Every business is dependent on Information Technology today, yet many small business owners are frustrated with the results that they are getting.

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.

What's a Chief Information Officer (CIO)?

In doing a search yesterday, I ran across hundreds of websites that stated that they offered CIO services.

When organizations first started to make use of computers, they called the manager of the group various names from Data Processing Manager, to IT Manager and most recently CIO. While most of these positions had a very similar role, that of managing the activities of the folks that supported computers at the company, the CIO was supposed to identify a new role, that of a business person who was responsible for helping the business to exploit IT to make it more profitable and effective.

While many CIOs still manage the IT function, it detracts from their ability to exploit technology to improve the business. If IT is outsourced, there still is a need for a CIO. Would CIOs be more effective in this situation? Could they add more value to the business? If the business didn't want to outsource would it make sense for the IT Manager and CIO to be two separate positions?

Many small businesses have outsourced IT support, because they just can't afford to hire the type of computer skills that they need. Even if they don't outsource, their computer staff do not have the business skills to help them take advantage of technology.

If they check the Internet for a CIO, most of what they find is IT support businesses that call themselves CIOs. They aren't. They are just computer and network support companies. They don't try to understand thye business, they simply fix what's broken.

If we really want to help small businesses to exploit Information Technology, then we need to focus on their business and not on fixing computer problems. That's not to say that keeping technology stable is not important (it is critical), but we should be past that. Maybe we need a new title instead of CIO, since CIO is being misused so much.