Without the proper contract, processes, procedures, and metrics to guide them, organizational leaders and their staff often resort to assuming IT functions that are not within their comfort zone or their areas of expertise.
This drain on time puts them in a position where they are spending more time managing IT, or the IT vendor, than doing their primary job. As a result, staff without guidance find themselves making purchasing decisions, authorizing projects, and making IT-related decisions without metrics to support them. This can be costly in many areas.
The right contract with the right management reporting with a proactive IT firm allows organizations to achieve an overall understanding of their IT strategy, maintain their correct job role throughout the engagement, and make data-informed decisions along the way.
A traditional, reactive IT company receives tickets and performs fixes—taking no time to analyze problems and keep them from recurring. Instead, they perpetuate distractions and IT fires because their business model is that of an IT vendor.
IT vendors position their business to grow and prosper based on the sheer quantity of IT problems their clients experience. So, even when a vendor responds to support requests quickly and pleasantly, their clients never actually increase their productivity level.
On the other hand, a proactive IT partner’s goal is to measure an organization’s productivity and use process improvement to continually find and address the root cause of each issue, so they can suppress the number of tickets submitted.
The vCIO (virtual chief information officer) is the quarterback for each organization’s IT needs. This differs from a commissioned salesperson or account representative. This is a business consultant whose responsibility is to shepherd good decision-making on the security and productivity side of your organization. This includes the vetting and participation in selecting vendors, like internet service providers (ISPs), web design/development groups and unified communications solutions, to name a few.
To help organizations meet their mission, it’s vital that MainSpring vCIOs remain technology agnostic, ensuring all best-practice tools in the marketplace remain at their disposal to meet new and emerging needs.
Within the ProSuite model, the vCIO and your organization’s leaders will work together to create a simple strategic plan that provides a clear picture of the way forward (i.e. our ProSuite IT Roadmap), a rolling quarterly budget, updated scores on how your organization is ranking against IT industry best practices, and recommendations to deliver productivity and scalability that align with business objectives.
On a recurring basis, organization leaders will participate in a structured vCIO meeting with their assigned MainSpring vCIO. The vCIO relationship remains vital to ensuring optimal use of the proactive IT model. The MainSpring vCIO serves as the primary point of contact with your organization leaders as their technology advisor.
