How a small biz can get a big CIO (with a small budget)

In the new economy, it is critical for businesses of every size to prepare for growth and to maximize efficiencies. This always sounds easier than it is. A good way to approach this challenge is to think in terms of outsourcing – not just IT, but outsourcing the entire CIO function.

Our company recently completed an engagement that illustrates how this concept works – actually, how it works extremely well.

We got started by performing a quick audit of the client's overall technology infrastructure -- touching everything from desktop support to enterprise systems, including line of business applications. We basically served as a senior level CIO in order to assess their use of technology, the state of their systems, look at their business processes and then provide a roadmap for the upgrades, efforts and costs the client will need to plan for the next 3-5 years.

In this engagement we are providing the services of what an experienced technology team would bring to a large company. The senior business perspective, business analysts, enterprise architects – the whole enchilada.

This type of engagement provides more value than anyone could have imagined. The client got senior talent and intelligence without hiring a big-ticket, full-time CIO (which they couldn’t afford anyway). Once the roadmap is in place our team provided part-time help as necessary to ensure that the recommended initiatives were accomplished properly.

At the conclusion of this project, the company saved around $15,000 in maintenance costs by simply creating a more uniform technology infrastructure, but more importantly they:
· massively reduced the risk of a business critical system outage
· improved their revenues by creating a better experience for their customers in the form of a client portal (which allowed their customers more access to key performance information, allowing our customer to look so good that their customer hired them for a multi-million dollar new project)
· saved thousands of man-hours on managing paper based processes
· Improved their Internet up-time from 2-3 outages per month to no outages at all

Businesses that use technology are more profitable, more efficient, and grow faster. And businesses that embrace new ways of thinking – such as outsourcing the CIO function – are the ones that will emerge bigger and better in the new economy.

About me: Mark Richtermeyer is the CEO of The Spitfire Group. Providing strategic business and technical services to companies that want to use technology to grow and become more profitable. Feel free to contact me at 303.485.1878, or mark@spitfiregroup.com

Government Run Healthcare

As a small business, we pay very close attention to the costs of insurance and healthcare costs that we provide for our employees. In the past few days I've heard the President mention that his government sponsored programs will keep private insurance companies honest. I ask who will keep the government honest? At least on an open market I am free to fire my insurance company and select another-I dont suppose I get thqt option with the government.

The other thing I heard him say was that a government program will not effect private programs, that they would not have an unfair advantage in the marketplace. And I think this is truly an intellectually dishonest statement. How can the rule maker not have an unfair advantage? Legislators place so many rules on the private companies that clearly will not apply to them-these legislators certainly have no idea the financial impact in the marketplace of the foolish requirements they create.

Based on recent legislation here in Colorado, our company is facing what we understand to be the highest rate increase our agent has ever seen in a year-almost a 70% increase in cost that will be shared by the company and employees. Unbelievable!

Mark

Workflow Benefits

I've recently witnessed numerous cases of businesses that are lacking processes for their core business deliverables. We've been told that processes run the business and people run the processes, but I personally believe that people play a larger role in the business than just running processes.

Nevertheless it is difficult to provide consistent quality and scale the business if good processes are not in place. The companion to a good porcess is a process tool. I was asked yesterday "how do you keep people from backsliding on new processes that you set up?", and the answer is simply to institute tools to track progress and make the new porcess a part of the job. Once a tool is in place and funtioning porperly it is awfully ahrd to move back to the old way of doing things. Sometimes we refer about this as adoption, and work very hard to get buy-in from the various users of the process to ensure that the tool is adopted fully. I argue that once this has happened it is much harder to backslide to an old way of doing things, and if the tool is configured well, it can identify a lack of adoption, or exceptions to the process-which in turn become management tasks.

Mark