Virtual CIO Service for Industrial Businesses

Common Questions about Our vCIO Service

• What is a vCIO?

  A vCIO, or virtual Chief Information, officer provides fractional CIO services to businesses. For our clients that don't have a CIO or an IT director, we step in and provide that as a service. Our vCIOs make sure our clients are receiving all the correct IT-related information that they need to get full insight into their IT environment so they can make good decisions. It also ensures they feel as if someone has their best interest in mind and that someone always has eyes on there their IT environment.

  For our clients that have a CIO or an IT director, we supplement that service for that CIO. Our job at that point is to make that IT Director or CIO more successful at the job our clients hired them to do.

• What Does a Technology Alignment Review Include?

  We have a group of engineers on our technology alignment strategy team that go forth and they meet with clients on site and remotely to perform assessments to look at their IT environment from top to bottom, inside and out. Their job is to collect data. The data they collect is funneled into tools that our vCIOs use to have full eyes into our client systems and how they're using that infrastructure.

  After reviewing the data, our vCIOs will meet with our clients for what we call technology alignment reviews. We just talk about their business needs, what their goals for the next fiscal year are, what they are changing from the past year going into the new season in order to ensure that those goals were met, etc. Based on those discussions, we talk about their IT. Is their IT going to meet those needs? Is it not? I take all of that data that’s consumed or aggregated from the technology alignment assessments that we perform and put together recommendations we believe will help them to be successful.

• What is a Technology Roadmap?

  After the first technology alignment review, based on the discussion that we've had with the client, we create what's called a technology roadmap. A technology roadmap is just a list of recommendations that we've put together and maybe a list of projects that have been identified in order to make sure that our client’s IT infrastructure is secure and working according to their business goals.

• Can You Give Me an Example or Case Study?

  One recent technology alignment review performed was for a manufacturing client. They have quite a few employees (they're larger on the medium-sized business scale) and were starting to run into some recurring problems with servers. So, we assisted them in this review with identifying available server options. We provided them with two choices, both having pros and cons over the other. In this meeting, we walked through their system, let them know how they were using it, and then provided the two options that we believed would be successful for them. And then from that review, their leadership team made an internal decision and went with the option they felt best served them.

  At this meeting, we identified security policies that had not yet been implemented internally in their company. We identified a strategy on how it's going to be implemented, what that process looks like, how that's going to get out to the end employees, and a timetable in which the process was going to start and end.

  The other thing that came out of this is we identified a true lifecycle for their systems. Their office workers have pretty high standards when it comes to computers and how well they're running, as expected in manufacturing. So, we agreed upon a five-year lifecycle. They had several computers that were past the 5-year mark for replacement, so those computers are going to be replaced in the next fiscal year, spread out over four quarters to spread out their IT spending.