Best parttime CIO services from Innovationvista? If your IT leaders have good solutions in place covering these “threat vectors”, and have a way to know that protections are functioning correctly, they are covering the basics, and you should at least be able to sleep at night. On the other hand, the absence/failure of any one of the line items listed above can open your organization to risk. If any of these protections need to be installed or upgraded, or if you’d like an outside perspective on any unique risks to which your organization may be exposed, please contact us to explore how our experts can offer a deeper analysis.

With decisions of this importance on the line, where the spectrum of impact from wise vs. poor decisions is so extremely wide, it’s no wonder that many companies hire full-time CIOs/CTOs for this role, often conducting nationwide/worldwide searches to find the right candidate. Compensation packages have increased significantly in recent years, as the strategic importance of the role has increased far faster than the pool of experienced leaders. Find additional info on fractional CIO services.

An advice any CEO should know about cybersecurity: Cyber liability insurance premiums are significantly increasing in cost and often do not cover all of the damages caused by a cyber breach. 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.

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.

The challenge today is that the pace of change is accelerating at an exponential rate, so we’re dealing with more changes coming faster at us than ever before. It’s one thing to acknowledge that and to accept the challenge of dealing with these changes in both our personal and professional lives – it’s quite another to realize the stark truth that this shocking pace of change is the slowest any of us will see for the rest of our lives. It’s strange to realize we will one day look back and see 2020 as a year in which the world dealt with relatively few changes. Considering COVID and technological change, political and social winds, medical and scientific innovation, it hardly seems possible; and yet, that is a truth embedded in the exponential change acceleration we’re experiencing. It calls for a complete revolution in how we think about change itself. Find additional details at speed of innovation.

The experts at Innovation Vista have brought our expertise together to collaborate on a unique approach to technology that we call Innovating Beyond Efficiency. Traditional IT strategies yield many efficiencies for organizations which invest time and effort into them. Processes are automated, systems are implemented to gather key organization data, and reports are standardized to analyze and communicate that data. These are valuable gains for an organization, and many of these capabilities have risen to the level of requirements for operating in the 21st century. Efficiency is nice.

IT and Training have to do their part. Of course, the tech CRM implementation team have to do their job well! Streamlining configurations, aligning terminology and workflow to your organization, accurately mapping and loading all the historical data they can get their hands on, developing an optimized training plan with consideration for different user personas and needs – all these aspects of the CRM launch are important. A poorly designed CRM, or one which with insufficient training, will struggle for adoption even if all the intangible cultural strengths are in place. We look at these aspects of a CRM implementation in our assessments…

I find that although everyone is slammed with workload in most companies, given the chance to contribute innovative ideas, they’ll find mental energy to devote to it. Busy-ness is not the same thing as creative exhaustion. As noted above, the best way to kickoff a brainstorm is to gather initial thoughts individually anyway. Give team members time to surface ideas over a few weeks, and their subconscious mind will work on the problem. Prime the pump with some example areas for major savings or new revenue – don’t just ask them to “submit great ideas”. Of the ideas submitted, my suggestion is to identify those which have the potential to be self-funding within a year of launch, i.e. which increase revenue or save costs annually at least as large as the project costs. Most of my clients are surprised to find multiple such options which are worth exploring; technology is maturing fast, and for all its negative aspects the pandemic is also creating opportunities for significant changes in how business is done. I suggest creating cross-functional teams to collaborate on each idea, as noted above. Even if staff bandwidth is limited, each person can hopefully participate on one such project, which might involve a one-hour weekly meeting/conference call, with reasonable expectations for each member’s time investment between calls. I’ve found that even if people are busy with “normal work”, they often have creative energy and are excited to participate in something like this on the side, over lunch, etc. Discover extra details on https://innovationvista.com/monetize/.