By Jeff Richards
Managing Partner

Life at a Nonprofit

For the past 2-1/2 years I’ve been the interim CIO at the YMCA of Silicon Valley – my fourth non-profit client since 2009. My experience is limited but I’ve seen a trend emerge.

Senior executives at non-profits are usually wonderful people who are very passionate about what they do. They’re very good at focusing on their mission and the services they offer to meet this mission. They have a clear understanding of who their constituents are. More often than not they have spent their entire career at their current organization or one that’s similar.

By Jeff Richards
Managing Partner

As an information technology consulting firm, CIO Professional Services specializes in information technology strategy and business/IT alignment. To better understand why organizations seek us out for assistance, we spoke with Ed Barrantes, Chief Financial Officer of the YMCA of Silicon Valley.

As described in a previous article, we’ve been working with the Y to help them overcome their very significant technology debt. They had a situation where systems had not been updated in over two decades! Here’s what Ed had to say about working with CIO Professional Services, and the 5 key values that he feels we bring to the table:

By Jeff Richards
Managing Partner

This is the third installment of our series on the outsourcing lifecycle. The first article provided an introduction to the outsourcing lifecycle and its five phases. The most recent article was about Phase I of this lifecycle, Assessing and Documenting Outsourcing Opportunities. Today we’ll do a deep dive into Phase II: Evaluating and Selecting a Service Provider.

This phase starts with the creation of a Request for Information/Proposal (RFI/RFP) and concludes with the selection of an outsourcing service provider.

By Scott Smith
Security Practice Lead

Whether talking to people at large companies or small companies, when we bring up the topic of Identity and Access Management (IAM) we often hear a lot of the same comments…

• “I am concerned that we have employees who have been here 10 years, and have access to everything, but I don’t know how to control that risk.”

• “Of course we have password policies…but I’m not sure they’re being enforced.”

• “I recently discovered an account for someone who left the company 14 months ago.”

• “Half the people in our IT department have global permissions—they can access anything.”

By Jeff Richards
Managing Partner

It is an unfortunate reality that most outsourcing deals fail to reach their true potential. Over the course of assisting many clients with outsourcing, we have found that the following seven things, either alone or in combination, are the major causes of dissatisfaction with outsourcing:

By Stephen McGrady
Associate

I’m a big believer in Enterprise Architecture Planning, the detailed planning process that looks at how an enterprise will use information to support the business, and provides a blueprint for handling data, applications and technology.

While the process of creating an EAP can be lengthy – typically six to ninth months – the end results can make a significant difference in the IT organization’s ability to meet business needs. From my standpoint, I think the key benefits include:

By Jeff Richards
Managing Partner

Considering hiring one of the big systems integrators (SIs) to help you with a large-scale project? This could be an excellent move. After all, the big systems integrators are known for their expertise in identifying, designing and deploying complex IT solutions for the enterprise.

Unfortunately, hiring a big systems integrator usually means big teams and big bills. It can also be a financial train wreck, as many of these organizations are renowned for bidding one thing and then by accident or design presenting change orders and scope creep that leads to much higher costs and longer schedules.

By Mark Tonnesen
Associate

If you're a CIO you've probably heard the question before, usually asked by your company's CEO, finance executives or operations leaders: "What's the value of IT?" And chances are the people asking this question have expected a metrics-based answer involving a close look at the percentage of revenue spent on technology, the number of projects delivered, the percentage of on-time and on-budget deliveries, etc.

Stop Asking the Wrong Question

As far as I'm concerned, though, "what's the value of IT" is the wrong question to ask and the wrong way to look at IT's true value. Here's why.

By Steven McIntosh
Associate

It's no secret that the vast majority of people who work at technology companies are men. Unfortunately, this is a serious problem that impacts these technology company's ability to succeed in an increasingly diverse economic world.

Why Technology Companies Need a Diverse Workforce

Today most technology companies are only getting the benefit of a single point of view. This not only breeds a lot of "group think," it can also make it hard for the team as a whole to truly understand many of the members of the companies' target audiences.

By Jeff Richards
Managing Partner

Thanks to the wonders of technology and transportation, today many (if not most) business processes can be performed almost anywhere in the world. As a result, your organization has countless options for global sourcing – so much so that analyzing all of the options can be challenging.

To assist you in this area, CIOPS has developed a matrix that serves as a succinct strategic framework for illustrating your global sourcing alternatives. Here’s what you need to know…

By Rocky Vienna
Principal

Good news! Businesses have never been closer to their customers. In fact, with the popularity of mobile apps, you can literally be in their pockets. Bad news – it’s a two-way street. Customers have immediate and impactful tools like Yelp, Twitter, and Foursquare to provide feedback to others on your product and services. A bad review can cause a feeding frenzy and negatively impact your brand.

These realities help explain why large companies have heavily invested in Big Data and Analytics. These platforms allow companies to reap the rewards of improved prospect-to-customer conversion rates, increased customer loyalty and the ability to quickly respond to service issues. And all of these things, in turn, help prevent the negative online reviews that all companies dread.

By Jeff Richards
Managing Partner

The Path to Becoming a CIO

If you want to be a CFO there's a fairly prescriptive list of things that you need to do to rise through the corporate ranks. For example, most CFOs start their careers working for one of the major accounting firms. They have CPAs. They understand general accounting, taxation, transactions, how to deal with board members and banks, and so forth.

But if you want to be a CIO there is nothing that remotely approaches a prescriptive list of what you need to do to get there. There's no special curriculum and no widely-accepted "must have" certification.

By Jeff Richards
Managing Partner

We deliver a lot of fractional CIO and interim CIO engagements at CIOPS. In fact, over the past six or so years we’ve seen the demand for fractional CIOs in what we define as the mid-market (i.e. organizations with sales in the $250MM to $1BB per year range) increase by around 60%. This is more than double the 25% or so increase in demand that we’ve seen for interim CIOs.

While I don’t have any actual studies or data to back this up, from where I sit it seems that more and more organizations are reaping the benefits of using fractional CIOs. Here’s what you need to know…

By David Haedtler
Principal

The decisions made about major IT issues – such as selecting the right IT product for your enterprise – can have an enormous impact on your organization's productivity and success. That's why clients often engage our services when they're faced with making software/vendor procurement decisions. They want to ensure that the contract is awarded to the product and vendor that is the best fit, not simply to the sales person with the closest ties to the CEO or other decision maker.

For important IT decision making, such as choosing enterprise software, the secret to success is to define your selection criteria first, and then see how each of your options stacks up. Here is the proven process that I recommend:

By Mark Tonnesen
Associate

Organizational change – including IT organizational change – is not a "project." It's not something with a nice, neat start date and end date, with deliverables and measurable outcomes. For an organization to survive over time, organizational change must be a continual initiative or charter that is always top of mind for members of the executive team, including the CIO.

By Scott S. Smith
Security Practice Lead

The recent data breach at Equifax is just one of the latest in a long string of high-profile cybersecurity failures. In this particular case, the Social Security numbers and other sensitive information of up to 143 million Americans were exposed. In another case, the NotPetya attack very quickly spread to, then severely hobbled operations in, corporations around the world, including the giant shipping company Maersk.

These and other recent cybersecurity failures in the news have resulted in intellectual property loss, disclosure of embarrassing communications, loss of business, massive public relations nightmares, and more. And that’s just for the high-profile cases!

By Mark Tonnesen
Principal

When evaluating potential IT initiatives, the most common approach is to focus on the numbers and look at the return on investment (ROI) or value case. For example, say your company is considering implementing a new Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. Chances are the CEO and CFO will ask, "What's the value?" Or, "If the new system will cost $10 million, can you show me how it will produce a $10 million ROI?"

As far as I'm concerned, though, if you're asking about the value case or ROI when evaluating IT initiatives, you're asking the wrong question and looking at the wrong things.

By Jeff Richards
Managing Partner

In today’s highly competitive global environment, many companies are taking a close look at outsourcing. Should they outsource? And if so, why?

What exactly is outsourcing?