A CIO, for those not in the know, is a ‘Chief Information Officer’, usually a fairly senior position in large organisations that is responsible for the alignment of information technology resource management. This position typically aligns information resources to complement and support business functions, and ensures optimal profitability through the usage of information technology resources at the company’s disposal. The positions almost always, reports directly to the CEO of the organisation. He will often times be responsible for policy creation, implementation, and continued management. He will be responsible for development of business critical information dynamics, training and implementation of information solutions that support and enhance the critical business processes to obtain optimal profitability, and ensure compliance with applicable standards and regulations. Usually, this is a very high profile position, with a very high profile salary, definitely outside the scope of the average small organisation.
At Dibs, we are proud to provide an intermediary product we refer to as ‘On-Call CIO’. The core function of this product is not to take over your outsourced IT functions, simply to help you ensure that the services and products available to your organisation, is optimally aligned to provide your organisation with the best value for money, and is managed to add value, not headaches.
Because each organisation’s needs differ due to individual business sectors, and personal management styles differ vastly, each organisation is assessed on it’s individual requirements. This product starts off with a meeting with the CEO or partners, where we ascertain whether we can be of service to the organisation, and regardless of service retention, we sign a standard non disclosure agreement, ensuring your proprietary privilege is protected at all times. Our core product will broadly consist of the following:
- Initial assessment of infrastructure, consisting of frameworks, service providers and currently implement solutions.
- Hardware audit to identify assets, upgrade ability standardization, areas of concern, areas of potential improvement.
- Software audit to identify legal licensing requirements, identify proprietary software requirements, and establish a ‘baseline standard’ for all systems. We identify business critical functions, and out of norm or specialized functions.
- Stakeholder interviews. This, we consider of being of utmost importance. All personnel that utilise information systems are interviewed to establish irritations, insecurities, training requirements, and current pitfalls and shortcomings.
- Detailed Information Solutions profile is created, and presented to management with assessments, projections and proposed measures. At this point, the organisation will decide to what extent dibs will provide them with services and solutions in future. This is fully backed by our KTH methodology.