Premium parttime CTO services by innovationvista.com? A key part successful digital transformation is assessing the needs and opportunities of organizations to ensure that the chosen strategy is the optimal path. Executives are justified in concerns about change, but with the pace of innovation being what it is in today’s economy, doing nothing is often actually more risky in many industries. Concerns about information security are legitimate, of course, but those countermeasures are table stakes in their own right, and many approaches to Digitalization do not raise security risks.
Technology has never been more strategic than it is to modern business. Because IT skills are so different from those possessed by many business leaders, most CEOs and Boards of Directors want an experienced leader at the top of their IT organization. Experience is critical in IT decisions from architecture to culture, staffing, and vendor options. These crucial decisions will reverberate – for better or for worse – across their companies for years to come… Explore even more info on fractional CIO.
A thing every CEO should know about cybersecurity: To achieve real information security and data resilience it is vital to combine managed Monitoring, Detection, and Response services with comprehensive disaster recovery and business continuity plans. It is vital that CEOs establish the appropriate cybersecurity “tone at the top” for their respective organization, regarding the importance of information security and how cybersecurity is everyone’s shared responsibility in a truly digital world. Establishing an organizational “culture of cybersecurity” has proven to be one of the best defenses against cyber adversaries. It is the people, not the technology, which can either be an organization’s greatest defense, or its weakest link against a cyber-attack.
This is not the main driving problem though. The top CRM systems (Salesforce, Dynamics, SAP, Oracle) have been designed with sales input, design thinking and user experience experts coming out their ears. I find several of the top systems really elegant in their combination of simplicity and power. It’s hard to imagine these systems being much simpler while still achieving their intended goal. Neither is the tech IQ of sales staff the major problem. Never before have salespeople had the level of technical skill that today’s sales professionals possess.
Startup companies who avoid inheriting a large installed base of “older” technology find themselves at an advantage, for a period of time at least. Some of these startups – “unicorns” – are companies that reach a $1B valuation in an incredibly short time. Many older companies will never have a chance at that kind of growth due to the weight of their legacy infrastructure, and the maturity of their competitive landscape. It requires an increasing amount of research time to stay current with technological capabilities, and that will do nothing but increase. Business leaders, already stretched to the limit by the demands of their “day jobs,” simply cannot invest the time to stay informed and up to date of all of the changes happening in the technology industry. That is where tech consultants like Innovation Vista can help, since we spend a significant portion of our time staying current in order to advise companies on how to stay current, and how to adapt their cultures to be ready for constant change. Explore even more details on tech stabilization.
We target our services at midsize companies. If you’re a company of this size (< $5B in annual sales), you will not likely see engagement with senior consultants or receive quality staff assigned from one of the Big 4 or Big 3. For each engagement we seek the best consultant match based on the client’s situational needs and the consultant’s industry and leadership expertise. If this approach intrigues you, please contact us to setup an initial conversation.
Executive leadership, does your sales team suffer from significant churn? It all comes down to human nature. (Good luck fighting that). It may take a bit of time and education, but in the end I think we can count on smart people to figure out how to act in their best interest. The question for leadership becomes this: is your company culture setup to ensure that your salespeople will believe that collaborating on a CRM platform is in their best interest? It is possible that your salespeople’s resistance to using the CRM system has nothing to do with the system, and everything to do with their plans (or general expectations) that they will be leaving your company in the fairly near future. When that happens, they know that if they have their own spreadsheets or outlook notes or big chief tablets, they can bring very valuable information along with them. If it all exists in the CRM, THEY CAN’T.
Aligning with this concept, the most effective brainstorming and work estimation techniques fully harness the power of each individual mind by ensuring that each round of ideas is worked on individually, and for the initial round at least, with no discussion between participants on the topic. This approach ensures the widest, most unfiltered, uninfluenced ideation and avoids the well-known trap of “groupthink”. Consider how different this set of behaviors is from Teamwork, where we want everyone to align to the same vision and work hard to achieve it, regardless of whether it was their idea or someone else’s, or a hybrid of ideas from people who only recently joined the organization. Just as sports teams have coaches, assistant coaches, captains and players, org-chart structures are useful in teamwork to ensure there is oversight of consistency and coordination. Everyone ideally acts together as one, as a member of the team and not as individuals. This is quite different from our goal in collaboration. Discover a few more details at aligning tech with business.
