Parttime CIO? Don’t fight human nature! Or at least, don’t kid yourself that waging such a fight will be effective to any extent. CRMs hold the promise of maximizing collaboration across an enterprise and putting the knowledge of the entire firm at the fingertips of each and every salesperson working there; they can be a key component of Monetizing IT…! Of course, there are critical responsibilities for IT staff and vendors in making a CRM launch successful… But to fully realize the vision and potential of a CRM, a company’s senior leadership must do its part to set the stage and nurture a culture in which the team will WANT to operate in a way that a CRM can empower.

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.

The real power comes when you know how a customer will best interact with YOU. Beyond understanding a customer or client generally, the real benefits come to companies who know how customer needs overlap with the company’s offerings, and to companies who can predict the timing of those needs more fully. This can be challenging when you’re not doing business with a customer yet, but to fill this gap myriad data brokers and aggregators offer data which can be harvested and combined for useful insights. One critical prerequisite for combining multiple outside sources (and later integrating internal data) is to identify a unique key for each record, which ideally can be obtained automatically from data generally complete and accurate in each source. Don’t be dissuaded if this step does require working through exceptions using outsource data cleansing services or temp/intern help. If you’re going to leverage multiple sources of data, it’s a critical step to develop and nurture this unique key; many companies who skip this step end up in a nightmare of duplicate records. Read even more info at customer deep insights.

Every business should aim to have an IT consultant! Hiring a permanent IT expert is expensive, especially for a startup. IT consultants in Nottingham such as the Custard Group charge for their services based on the amount of work done for a company. A business may not require advanced IT services every month. For instance, a company may only require an expert to install a new system and train the users on how to use it. After the installation, the company can run the system and consult the expert when issues arise.

A thing any CEO should know about cybersecurity: Achieving information security compliance with one or more government regulatory standards for information security (i.e. ISO 27001, NIST 800-171, HIPAA, NYDFS, etc.) is good, but not sufficient to ensure real cybersecurity. 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.

Because we recruit experienced C-level IT executives as lead consultants, our team brings expertise and proven track records to these engagements. Our experts are comparable to anyone at the senior partner level at Deloitte, PwC, Accenture, E&Y, McKinsey, BCG or Bain, but we have four significant advantages these competitors cannot match: Our lead consultants remain fully engaged throughout the term of our consulting projects. When you engage one of the “Big 4” accounting firms or “Big 3” strategy firms, you may never again see the senior partner from the day the contract is signed. See extra info on Commercial Real estate IT.