Mid-Size Businesses And The Importance Of The CIO

Spending More?

As with the rest of the economy, IT spending has certainly reduced from it’s peak a few years ago, however it is on the rise again with Gartner predicting IT spend in 2012 to rise by 5.2% (excluding exchange rate fluctuations), across all sectors with the exception of spending in public/governmental sector which will shrink by 0.8%.

What is particularly interesting is that small and medium sized businesses are those that are looking to increase their spend through to the end of 2016.

Spending Less

Not all businesses are spending more, some are looking to spend less. Sometimes these reductions are the justification for additional IT spend, however many organisations are looking to sweat their assets a little more.

An Experienced CIO or IT Director

Regardless of if you’re looking to spend more, or spend less, you’re going to need a CIO with experience and knowledge of the following:

Helping establishing business strategy
Aligning change with your business strategy
Aligning IT with business strategy
Strategy aligned cost reduction
Total cost of ownership analysis
The importance of mobile to you business, its staff and its customers
Constructing and running RFPs to deliver the solutions your business requires
Online business and its importance to your business
Social media, and how to empower your business
Technologies that can improve the efficiency and costs of organisations
Bring your own devices
Big data
Cloud infrastructure and Software as a Service (SaaS)
Case management
Workflow
Business and IT best practice and governance
Change, project and programme management
Vendor management
Hardware and software consolidation
Regulatory requirements for your business and your industry
These skills take decades to gain and to hone, and the employees with all of those skills are rare and very expensive.

You Can Always Get a CIO Right?

Good people can be hard to find, and recruitment takes a lot of your time and has large hard and soft costs associated with it. With the increase in IT expenditure, good CIOs are becoming increasingly harder to find, and what’s more, your organisation’s requirements are changing increasingly quickly, meaning that the CIO you need today may not be the CIO you need tomorrow.

There is an Alternative

Businesses need flexibility, and you want to leverage decades of experience to give your business the strategic and commercial advantage over your competitors, plus you want to be able to change direction with fluidity, and at the right cost.

Virtual CIOs or Virtual IT Directors are the answer; they can be ramped up or down in line with your business requirements, they allow you to leverage decades of experience for your organisation allowing you to implement change that wouldn’t otherwise be possible, or certainly not at the pace that your business requires.

Your Next Steps

If you have a need for flexible senior IT resources with decades of experience to help with a specific project to to help your organisation meet its business objectives, be they cost reduction or growth then please feel free to ask a question of Fifth Step’s Virtual IT director team who will ensure you’re on the right path.

Darren Wray