High quality virtual CIO services from Innovationvista? If your IT leaders have good solutions in place covering these “threat vectors”, and have a way to know that protections are functioning correctly, they are covering the basics, and you should at least be able to sleep at night. On the other hand, the absence/failure of any one of the line items listed above can open your organization to risk. If any of these protections need to be installed or upgraded, or if you’d like an outside perspective on any unique risks to which your organization may be exposed, please contact us to explore how our experts can offer a deeper analysis.

With decisions of this importance on the line, where the spectrum of impact from wise vs. poor decisions is so extremely wide, it’s no wonder that many companies hire full-time CIOs/CTOs for this role, often conducting nationwide/worldwide searches to find the right candidate. Compensation packages have increased significantly in recent years, as the strategic importance of the role has increased far faster than the pool of experienced leaders. Discover more details on parttime CIO services.

A trick every CEO should know about cybersecurity: Cyber-attacks and security breaches will occur and will negatively impact your business. Today, the average cost of the impact of a cyber breach is $4.9 million. Historically, cybersecurity has been an area that is housed solely in the technology department of a company, whether that consists of one or twenty employees. But more and more executives are understanding the importance of being not only knowledgeable but also involved in the conversations and decision-making process when it comes to protecting their data.

The world is becoming increasingly personalized. Frequent flier numbers and customer membership programs enable companies to track consumers’ buying patterns; social media platforms and digital marketing channels enable them to know even more about our preferences and lives. The door has been opened to inappropriate uses of this information, as evidenced by the “fake news” and Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandals from the 2016 election. But far more commonly, companies are using customer data in legitimate to personalize their communications with customers, with significant results. Customers are happy for you to know about them. According to Accenture, 83% of consumers are willing to share their data in order to enable a personalized B2C experience, and 91% say it actually impacts their buying habits. For B2B purposes, companies have long known there is easy access to public data about them, so any gain in efficiency is welcomed from suppliers who make use of that information (ideally with internal data as well – see below) to streamline the experience for their clients.

Leadership’s Mindset about Change is Key for Survival and Success: Much of success in this age of accelerating change will come from how leaders frame the challenge for their organizations. We suggest embracing it, and designing in a regular assessment and redirection of strategy to their business as a “heartbeat”. Avoiding the perception of change and innovation as an “interruption” to business, and encouraging it as an ongoing opportunity for them to jump (and stay) ahead of the competition. Discover a few more info on startup business it strategy.

Innovation Vista has a unique approach to selecting consultants for our engagements; we only hire lead consultants with experience as C-level IT leaders or Partner-level consultants who have demonstrated track records of tangible business results impacting Revenue, Market-share, and/or Margin significantly for their employers/clients. Our network includes consultants with experience in all major industries: Communication Services, Consumer Discretionary, Consumer Staples, Energy, Financial Services, Healthcare, Industrials, Information Technology, Materials, Real Estate, Utilities and more.

Culture flag-bearers, does your sales team suffer from internal poaching? It is possible that your salespeople’s reluctance to enter all their customer insights, predictions, and followup ideas has nothing to do with how (in)efficient those features have been designed, or whether they’re available on a mobile device, etc. and everything to do with their fear that their colleagues will POACH those insights and steal sales from them in the future.

Aligning with this concept, the most effective brainstorming and work estimation techniques fully harness the power of each individual mind by ensuring that each round of ideas is worked on individually, and for the initial round at least, with no discussion between participants on the topic. This approach ensures the widest, most unfiltered, uninfluenced ideation and avoids the well-known trap of “groupthink”. Consider how different this set of behaviors is from Teamwork, where we want everyone to align to the same vision and work hard to achieve it, regardless of whether it was their idea or someone else’s, or a hybrid of ideas from people who only recently joined the organization. Just as sports teams have coaches, assistant coaches, captains and players, org-chart structures are useful in teamwork to ensure there is oversight of consistency and coordination. Everyone ideally acts together as one, as a member of the team and not as individuals. This is quite different from our goal in collaboration. Explore more details at https://innovationvista.com/stabilizing-it/a-security-checklist-for-ceos-to-sleep-at-night/.