Tuesday May 11, 2004

New Part-Time CIO Service

by Jay F. Davis, www.acsoft.biz

I've been busy lately with some new clients, however, the most interesting new development is the part-time CIO role that I am now performing for one of my clients. (See my new part-time CIO info page.)

For the uninitiated, the CIO, or Chief Information Officer, of a corporation is the person who is in charge of the computers and technology needs of a company. Normally, CIOs are only found in very large corporations because they imply executive compensation packages. However, I offer CIO-level services to smaller companies for a fraction of the cost of hiring a full-time CIO yet with many of the strategic benefits of a full-time CIO.

There are some practical limitations, of course. A part-time CIO only makes sense for what I call growing small companies with revenue of $1 million to about $20 million a year. I still work for some smaller companies but these companies do not yet have the data integration and IT planning problems that these next tier companies must address. Thus, they aren't quite ready to invest in a part-time CIO.

But enough of the general discusssion. For my part-time CIO engagement, here are some of the practical tasks I am addressing:

  • Implementation of a Search Engine Optimization strategy to draw more potential customers to the company web site.
  • Integration of new online web users into Liaison, the contact management software currently being used by the company to manage sales contacts. New web user data is now automatically merged into the current system, increasing the number of potential sales contacts.
  • Data analysis to identify trends in product sales and consequently focus marketing efforts toward more profitable products. I'll also be enabling current employees to do this analysis themselves.
  • Risk mitigation by insuring that proper security precautions are taken with company data.

All this is being done in the context of the company's goals so that there is a clear return on investment. Each task is tied to a business goal and prioritized based on business benefit.

This is an exciting development for me and brings together in a nice way many of my best talents. I look forward to offering the same service to other clients.