When I first started in my role as Virtual CIO (vCIO), colleagues were confused. As I meet new people, they similarly can be confused by the vCIO title. I like that this is the case because it opens up a conversation. They say, “What is a vCIO? Does this mean you exclusively work remotely?”. I would say no, but I do have flexibility. Let me tell you what a vCIO does… Unfortunately, this pandemic has made my work 100% remote, but I digress. The “virtual” in vCIO means that I serve as a varying sized CIO for a variety of public, private, and non-profit sector clients across a variety of industries. An overarching descriptor for my work is customer success management. I seek to build strong meaningful business relationships and look for ways and areas to help clients improve or transform their business through technological innovation.
More specifically, I provide CIO like services that support strategic continuous improvement through thoughtful adoption, change management, and careful governance of technology.
What Does A Virtual CIO Do?
Strategy and Road-mapping
I have learned the importance of an integrated approach to visioning, planning, and goal setting, where business leaders and technology experts undertake the journey together. Technology is not an end unto itself, if the adoption of new tools and practices does not improve something, what is the point? In leading and facilitating strategic business-technology visioning, planning, road mapping, and goal setting activities for clients, I help them focus on what’s important near and long term. I find now that many plans lead to modernizing the workplace for the digital era. The 2020 pandemic has driven this need more than at any time previously. Clients need effective technological platforms, tools, and processes to support remote and hybrid work scenarios.
To be successful, I study and learn the business, their history, their people, and their worries. Being a life-long learner who craves “the new” and loves to engage with people, I find this work to be fascinating. What a privilege to be able to help a set of diverse clients do better through effective selection and adoption of technology.
To help clients navigate the ever-changing technological landscape, I provide art-of-the-possible and ideation sessions to envision and consider new technological capabilities and benefits. These educational sessions may run as lunch & learns or more formal presentations or workshops. The goal is to educate and to help clients know what they don’t yet know about what is now possible through technology to enable their business to do wholly new activities or to improve existing processes. Subsequently, I may construct business cases to give clients comfort in seeing the rationale for careful investment in new technologies and process changes.
Clients appreciate having a trusted advisor, a person to bound ideas off, to rely on as a coach. The more time I spend with clients, the more value I can provide.
Governance
I help clients with their technological rule book by reviewing, revising, or developing policies, regulations, procedures, and standards. I develop security incident response plans and playbooks, disaster recovery plans, and facilitate risk assessments, documentation, and management. I can help clients with their near and long term budgeting process, including technology lifecycle management, to match up with their roadmap activities. I can advise clients on governance structures for managing and supporting technology including IT organizational design.
Adoption and Change Management
Buying and ‘implementing’ technology often fails when adoption and change management is not built-in. I develop approaches, structures, and facilitate practices to ensure successful and valuable implementation. Success is achieved when people use the new tools and their work is more productive, enjoyable, and streamlined. My goal with clients is that they make this practice a priority component of any technology initiative that visibly impacts their people.
In conclusion, as a vCIO, I am just an adaptable CIO who facilitate business success with technology for multiple diverse clients.
Reap The Benefits Of Having a vCIO
Are you constantly keeping the lights on for your company? Does your IT team struggle to find time to work on strategic projects?
Having an expert vCIO as part of your business’ operations can be beneficial to achieve the digital transformation you desire.
Reach out to us today to discuss your technology road-map.
Written By:
Brian Kuhn
As Softlanding’s vCIO, Brian engages with clients on strategy, the art-of-the-possible, planning, transformation, road-mapping, business case development, architecture, cloud computing, change management, technology adoption, and project leadership. Brian is passionate about being able to serve, guide, and help clients navigate ever evolving technological change and opportunity, to their business advantage.
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