Five Ways to Organize for Success Every CIO Needs to Know

Guest post by James Clent, VP of Industry Relations at ROAR for Good. Related Reading: The 7 Pillars to Change Technology into an Innovation Tool.

Maintaining stability through 2021 and beyond has proven to be increasingly challenging for IT leaders and staff alike.

It’s becoming more and more difficult to drive innovation, company culture, and employee productivity amidst a myriad of external challenges caused by the global pandemic. However, technology labor continues to be the most costly factor of IT budgets and so the importance of driving employee satisfaction and focusing on the team is underlined to deliver on the demands of quickly changing consumer needs.

Here are five simple tips on how to organize your IT department for success:

Keep the help-desk inside the organization— it is a people business. Your employees need to feel they are talking to someone that understands what they are doing and what they are struggling with; rather than talking to someone who goes down a checklist. However, stack your helpdesk with projects as well, so that your peak capacity can be filled up with other work in times when the number of tickets is low.

Cyber control—keep the core inside, but outsource as much as you can in the form of tools and services. The core needs to be inside since they are ones that can make accurate risk assessments based on their company and process knowledge. A vendor will always try to convince you of the worst case possible to extract more funds (their revenue). Furthermore, your teams can think outside the box. For instance, at Remington, we decided to outsource our credit card machines, rather than trying to keep up with PCI controls for our Hotel restaurants and bars.

Partner with a managed services company, or deploy Software as a Service solutions which are managed by the provider. Make sure that you put in place Service Level Agreements in the contract in terms that are unambiguous and clear, as well as penalty clauses for when those SLA’s are not being met. Remember, contracts are not entered into for when everything is going fine, contracts are there to help you when things are not going as they are supposed to go.

Build a transformation department that consists of Business Analysts, Architecture, Data Management, Governance, Change Management, Quality Assurance, and project control. Here is the magic, these teams know the business, they know the data and application landscape like no other, they know how to make things fit and work within the existing technology environment, but most of all they know your business objectives and leaders and have a strategic relationship with those teams.

Optimize an Offshore Team. Work with a partner who has the expertise and proven success in building dedicated global resource teams who can become a direct extension of your in-house team for the long term; so that you can accelerate your company’s growth and innovate while minimizing increased costs. The key here is to work with a partner you can trust who shares your best interests so that you can focus on innovation. With a people-first focus and unique approach to attracting quality talent from the start, SMC Squared has helped CIOs save an average of 42% while achieving a 90% employee retention rate.

Now you may ask me about ”resource lock-down” for these teams. Resource lock-down comes from having a development staff that has to be continuously engaged to be cost-effective, and thus is not able to nimbly turn on a dime to start working on a new initiative or deliverable. And even though that is of course a consideration, these teams can stack their work based on prioritization and still keep multiple projects and vendor teams going.

To have the best results it is imperative to have onsite resources of your development partners as well, so they can be the communicators, project managers, and accountable for the deliverables you need.

As an added benefit of this approach, your teams will be very engaged with the business, feel they are contributing, and are appreciated by the teams they work with and for. All of this contributes to happy employees and very little turn-over.

• To learn more about SMC Squared’s approach to building an employee-centric team, click here.
• Read more about how SMC Squared partners with clients to save an average of 42% on IT talent as they turn to our innovative Global Insourcing Centers.
• Want to go inside a GIC? Click here.

For more information contact:
Trent Michaels
Director, Business Development
trent.michaels@smc2.com