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