A Virtual CIO (Chief Information Officer) is a consultant, a third-party, or business that offers a service to fulfill the role as a conventional CIO. Businesses are ever-changing due to technological advances with different computer network tools and platforms used in the workplace. While Technology teams used to answer to the Finance department, the role of CIO has grown in its importance at the C-Level table because of those innovations and the need for technology oversight and eventual adoption.
Virtual CIOs are accountable for both project-based and ongoing technology initiatives. The responsibilities differ depending on whom they affect, scheduling availability, business goals and budgetary needs. However, the overall goal of the CIO is to envision the high-level technology plan and provide the company with the best solution.
River Run provides companies with Virtual CIO Services that deliver meaningful results. How?
- Strategic Planning and Budgeting Roadmaps: Collaborative three-year strategic planning is done to identify necessary hardware and software updates and replacements, based upon future goals and budgetary needs.
- IT Governance Review and Policy Development: We review key personnel, current governance and IT policies, and update or create new policies that are needed.
- IT Department Review and Development: We evaluate needed skills, department roles, support tickets, educational practices, conduct staff interviews and analyze budgets.
- IT Department Management and Oversight: Management and review of vendor and staff activities are directed, along with tracking of hardware and software needs, establishment and monitoring of staff performance measurements, address uptime/downtime requirements, strategize, test and review a disaster recovery/business continuity plan, and develop IT Management, service standards and processes.
- IT Experience Review: Departmental interviews are completed with key personnel to identify goals and challenges for each department over the next three years. We also survey users by email regarding their IT experience to identify what is working and what needs improvement.
- Cybersecurity Readiness Analysis: We review security policies and practices against a Cyber-attack and Standards checklist, prioritize areas of risk and remediation, check passive vulnerability security scans and analysis on important sites, develop company-wide IT Security Strategy, and conduct end-user security training.
- Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity Planning: Review current plan, identify systems/services/files needed to be included in the plan, classify criticality and determine recovery time needed on all equipment and services, and develop the process for recovery in the event of a disaster.
- Third-Party Vendor Management: Review vendor agreements and contracts, review Service Level Agreements (SLA) and adherence to that SLA, create RFP documents when changing vendors, and ROI calculations based on services needed and investment.
- Executive Leadership Advisory: Participate in executive leadership meetings and planning sessions to ensure IT is incorporated into the company’s future, review industry trends and provide recommendations to Leadership with support data.
River Run offers a variety of both Managed IT and a la carte IT services, such as CIO services, to meet your company's needs. We start every new relationship with a thorough assessment of your network, then customize the services provided to your specific business needs. Because we work with businesses in many different industries, we are able to provide insights that go beyond traditional solutions to your IT challenges. As specialists in the unique needs of the manufacturing, education, financial, legal, and municipality industries, we are able to bring solutions developed for our specialty clients to businesses in any industry.
We are committed to helping our people, our clients and our community achieve meaningful results.
For more information on what that could look like for your company, call (414) 228-7474.
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