The rapid evolution of emerging technologies and the impact this has had on business has propelled technology executives into the C suite across most industry sectors. This has generated much discussion and activity around the new responsibilities and skill sets technology executives must accept and master. A great deal has been written to advise and assist CIOs and CTOs become leaders and successful contributors, setting and executing strategy for businesses on the path to digital transformation.

All of this is positive and will strengthen the individuals and organizations to the extent that they adopt the advice. Not so much attention has been given to the other members of the C suite – CFOs, CEOs and Board members who are also incurring new responsibilities and the need for new skills as businesses develop models focused on emerging technologies.

CFOs in particular need to recognize the expanded responsibility they have as business uses technology to develop new deep relationships with customers, suppliers, employees, regulators and shareholders.

Navigating Digital Transformation

The technology chiefs will have responsibility for knowing, recommending and implementing technology – dealing with the detailed, system integration, deployment and operation of infrastructure and applications.

The CFO’s responsibility is the financial impact of digital transformation on the enterprise and that can be extensive in ways that never came into play before.

To be clear, the focus for the CFO and C suite should be the management of technology’s role in the business and not the technology itself. Technology is evolving rapidly and promising so many attractive potentials that it is tempting to take on an aggressive agenda seeking benefits across an array of technologies. By focusing on strategies to manage technology the C suite can safeguard and promote the future of the business.

The CFO is responsible for weighing the value of all technology investment. He or she must consider each investment in the context of the entire business. For example, a customer experience improvement must compete with a new marketing campaign and literally countless other ways of investing the business’s resources. Steps to reduce cost through automation or outsourcing need to consider the effect on customer service and ability to develop new product.

Near term decisions need to allow for strategies to future proof the business, to remain flexible and able to respond to changes in the market as customer needs change and technologies continue to evolve.

Managing Cyber Security and Risk

Cyber security has become a major responsibility for the CFO and his peers. A security strategy to prevent compromise is essential. A strong combination of internal and external security protection must be in place. Equally important is a robust, rehearsed response plan for when security is compromised. The financial implications of a security breach are severe and far reaching.

Research conducted by the National Cyber Security Alliance found that as much as 60 percent of hacked small and medium-sized businesses go out of business after six months. While the CIO deals with the technical aspects of a breach, it will fall to the CFO to answer to the regulating authorities, banks, customers, and suppliers. and take steps necessary to restore the business to firm financial footing, if possible. Security also plays into the very valuation of the business. A security breach can have impact on the valuation of a business, and security must also be considered regarding mergers and acquisitions. A CFO must be on guard against acquiring a company that brings with it a significant security risk.

Given these increased responsibilities for navigating digital transformation, in addition to a full load of strategic and day to day operations what is a CFO to do? Well, don’t go it alone.
Small and medium size businesses can work with a partner who has knowledge and experience – real experience in situations where what they know and what they have done can be applied to their enterprise.

48 percent of SMBs plan to transform their business for a digital future yet many don’t understand what digital transformation really is.

Strategic Financial Management of Technology

CFOs can develop a playbook. Identifying areas to be addressed on a regular basis using internal and external resources. The CFO and C suite peers will learn to assess technologies that have real value for that business. They will know the cost of these technologies, the impact to the current and future bottom line and the opportunity cost of the choices they support.

They will learn to focus on the management of technology and best practices in IT governance, and portfolio management. The C suite team will become aware of and sensitive to IT debt built by deferring investment to replace aging infrastructure or legacy applications. They will avoid building liabilities that reduce the business’s valuation, increase risk and hinder the flexibility needed for the future of the business.

Mastering the Customer Experience

They will also become technology users familiar with and benefiting from data analytics, business intelligence and process automation. They will invest time and effort to learn what their customer’s experience is and how to improve it.

Partnering with a network of expert resources the C suite will demystify the hype around IoT, Artificial Intelligence, Block Chain and Machine Learning and understand when and if these technologies might have true meaning for their customers and add value to their enterprise.

To increase their ability to manage technology the CFO and peers will get involved, learning how emerging technologies are being used in their industry or similar industries. Environmental scans will assess what is being done by traditional and non-traditional competition.

By exercising this playbook periodically and repeatedly, the C suite will monitor progress being made, refining and maturing emerging technologies. This will promote development of an organization with the people and resources that can take advantage when the time is ready.

What We Can Achieve Together

If you are looking for assistance on the journey to digital transformation, IT Ally™ can help. For starters check out our IT Fitness Test and our Business Agility Test here. To learn more about IT Ally’s C Suite IT Advisor services, please visit itallyllc.com or, schedule a 30-minute consultation with one of our key advisors.

[This article was originally published on itallyllc.com.]

While on vacation in South Carolina visiting family and friends in Myrtle Beach and Hilton Head last week, I decided to pack my clubs and enjoy a few rounds of golf.

Our first stop was Myrtle Beach to visit my in-laws and play golf with my father-in-law, Garry, who is 80, and Griffin, my 17-year-old son – a cherished annual tradition. We arrived at the course to find it was a “cart-path-only” day due to recent heavy rains. To the non-golfers reading this, cart-path-only means that if you are driving a golf cart, you must stay on the paved path and cannot ride on the grass.

For the average golfer like me, this is always a challenge. I am often uncertain which direction my ball will go. Therefore, having the use of a cart that can roam the course, creates more flexibility and more importantly, speeds up the pace of play. In this case, I also had not only to consider my play but my son, a novice and my father-in-law, ailing but accurate, now required to walk to his ball, though often in the fairway and easy to find. This round of “cart-path-only golf” had to end after nine holes. But never the less we had a great time together.

Golf mecca Hilton Head Island was the back end of our trip. Griffin and I booked an early, twosome tee time to beat the heat. Once again, we learned, at check-in, it was another “cart-path-only” day. Undeterred, we went on to play a very enjoyable if long and tiring 18-hole round of golf.

Upon reflecting on this experience, it got me thinking about the limitations, constraints and lack of flexibility of this “cart-path-only” approach and how it might apply to business. The objective to score low was now shared with the objective for fast play and less arduous completion of the course. To achieve this, you had to deliberately and successfully hit your ball within proximity of the cart path.

For a business that would mean constraint to a single strategy. You would have no option to adjust or to respond to market changes, locked into your lane unable to take advantage of opportunities.

I am certain the feelings I experienced on the course, being limited, slow to move and bound to a predefined path, would hamper and strangle a business trying to compete in today’s rapidly changing and dynamic market.

Defining Business Agility

In 2009, I wrote an article titled “Building an Agile Organization.” It proposed that “agile organizations have processes and structures that enable them to know what is going on both internally and externally, . . . and the mechanisms needed to act quickly on that knowledge.”

“ . . . evidence indicates that enterprises can best achieve agility by following basic management principles, using imagination to see an organization in a different light and having a willingness to adjust or change based on circumstances.”

I laid out 3 capabilities, key to pursuing and achieving business agility.

• Learn to sense and respond
• Emphasize improvement and innovation
• Distribute and coordinate authority

Agility provides business the power to move quickly and easily; nimbleness. It is the ability of an organization to renew itself, adapt, change quickly and succeed in a rapidly evolving, ambiguous, turbulent environment.

Becoming an agile organization is easier said than done. But in my opinion, has the potential to yield superior business performance.

Agility Challenges and Impact

Agility has always been a hallmark of large successful, established companies. But with today’s levels of uncertainty, ambiguity, market volatility and globalization, agility is essential for any company. If you think you’re still in a corner where this doesn’t hold true, wait for the disruption to come. Tomorrow it will be relevant for you.

From a technology perspective, inflexible legacy IT systems, technical debt, antiquated infrastructure, insufficient skills and resource constraints, budgetary challenges, a short-term planning perspective, an ineffective governance process and data quality issues, could be the “cart-path-only” placards constraining your game.

It’s easy to envision how these limitations cause a competitive disadvantage. It results in the inability to meet changing customer needs, to address regulatory and compliance requirements, increased exposure to security risk and ultimately an inefficient and costly operating model.

Important Questions to Consider

If you are trying to master business agility or just want out of the “cart-path-only” mode; IT Ally™ can help.   For starters, here are a few questions from our Business Agility diagnostic that, at a minimum, tee off your own self-assessment.

1. How quickly can your company respond to new opportunities/challenges?
2. Who has primary responsibility for planning for change?
3. What is the general state of your technology environment and how well do your major systems share data with each other?
4. What is the primary factor in guiding alignment among decisions in your company?
5. What visibility into industry and market trends do you have?

To learn more about Business Agility, please visit itallyllc.com. Or, schedule a 30-minute consultation with one of our key advisors.

[This article was originally published on itallyllc.com.]

Listen to this IT Ally™ Podcast interview to learn more about the formation of IT Ally and how they are helping SMB’s to leverage technology for strategic advantage.

Read The Podcast Transcript

Hello, I’m John Connors, writer and commentator on technology in the business community.

I’m here today with Michael Fillios, founder and CEO of IT Ally, the recently established company dedicated to providing competitive advantage in technology to small and medium size businesses.

I’m going to ask Michael what makes IT Ally unique, capable, and the right choice for SMBs. Michael, by way of introduction can you tell us how IT Ally came about and what you expect to accomplish?

Basically, if you look at the importance of the small and medium businesses in our economy today there are number factors that we should consider.

1. Statistics show 3 out of every 4 hires in our economy are coming from small businesses. 

2. This demographic certainly represents a significant portion of our economy in that it supports a lot of our GDP growth and

3, just the sheer size and scale of businesses that exist, nearly thirty million, just in the United States alone, represents a significant portion of our overall market. 

That being said, there are number of companies that have attempted to service this market space, particularly from an IT consulting perspective, and that have not had wide success.  My view on that is that these companies were established businesses servicing much larger clients and decided that they wanted to go downstream into markets to grow their businesses. 

Yet that still left the infrastructure, overhead and complexity that just, quite frankly, is not attractive to the small business owner. 

That’s one of the things that makes IT Ally more unique is that we were conceived with the sole intent of servicing small and medium business owners and spent a lot of time in developing the appropriate offers that would allow these organizations to not only afford but also digest the service offerings and that is where some of the uniqueness of our business model comes into play. And, now we’ve begun to see wide interest in our offering. 

Not only in the areas of IT but quite frankly, in areas outside of IT, in other functional areas such as legal, HR, finance, sales, etcetera. 

So with that, the nature of the IT Ally model, essentially what we are doing is providing. enterprise level capabilities and talent to the everyday business and we’re able to do this, as I said, by packaging up our offerings such that they are affordable and digestible to these businesses largely on a subscription basis which is how we provide them. 

Michael, you have a broad-based background in large businesses and in various sectors. Tell us about your experience and how it has prepared you and IT Ally to provide leadership for smaller scale enterprises?

I believe the modern day IT leader needs to possess a variety of skills and capabilities to be successful in today’s dynamic and challenging environment.  My IT leadership experience came as an accident as I was asked to lead an ERP evaluation, selection and implementation for a $30M global pharmaceutical company where I was in charge of Accounting.  I still revert back to this experience as it was the beginning of thinking about IT from a business perspective meaning, what outcomes did we want to achieve as a business and how was technology going to enable them to be realized 

Although, at the time, the technology landscape was also evolving we never got enamored with the technology itself.  My early experience in auditing and leading the accounting function, being a management consultant, a start up entrepreneur and ultimately a corporate CIO in large global companies, has given me a very unique set of experiences of seeing IT in many different facets. 

From acquisitions, to divestitures, through bankruptcy and emergence, across several decades of technology evolution, I have benefited from applying technology to solving many different business challenges including, growth, cost containment, risk mitigation and customer experience which quite frankly are many of the same challenges that SMB’s are facing today. 

Leaders of small and medium sized businesses have several priorities vying for attention in today’s environment. And technology is complex and rapidly changing. How can IT Ally assist these leaders in making technology challenges more approachable as one of the many factors they have to deal with?

The challenge for SMB’s is that most of these organizations don’t need to have a full time IT leader certainly not a CIO, Chief Information Security Officer, roles like this, but quite frankly have some of the same complexities that a fortune 500 company would. In fact, most recent trends reported by SMB Group on the Top 10 trends in technology for small and medium businesses suggest that many of these companies are faced with some of the same decisions around how to leverage technology such as artificial intelligence, analytics, big data as well as many others on the list including robotics or internet of things not to mention having to do it in a secure fashion. 

So, these are very daunting challenges for most Fortune 500 CIOs never mind small business that are thinking about how do we leverage these wonderful technologies to help us grow, differentiate and secure our businesses.

So, that’s the opportunity,  how do we bring folks that have had this experience, we’re talking about individuals with 25 – 30 years’ experience, that have been in wide ranging situations, understand how business runs and want to apply that experience and capability to these organizations that need it to not only survive but effectively to thrive against the continuous competition that arises in the marketplace on a daily basis. 

So that in a nutshell is IT Ally. We are continuously adding to our offerings, not only in conducting assessments of what a world class IT organization needs to look like at a small or medium business. But also providing other services, education and ways that we can provide full services to our partners and our clients. 

Confronted with the complexity of technology, an SMB leader might be concerned with the financial commitment needed to take on a robust technology agenda. Can you talk about the cost and value proposition IT Ally offers?

One of the advantages of our business model is that we have built from the ground up exclusively to service the small and mid size business market.  Because of this, we have really focused on packaging our offerings so that they are not only affordable, but also digestible to our clients.   

When we look at the SMB market, we define it by the number of employees.  For example, small businesses are those with 1-49 employees and medium size businesses are with 50-499 employees.  With this level of diversity, it is essential to have offerings that will scale up and down, be repeatable, yet still allow for some level of tailoring to meet our clients needs. 

For example, we offer several fractional models to access our CIO’s, CTO’s and CISO’s on a subscription basis depending on the level of scope and engagement necessary to deliver value to the client. 

Michael, we have talked about your business experience as an executive, successful in managing technology and deriving benefit for businesses but you can’t duplicate that success yourself across an SMB client base. What resources does IT Ally bring that can operate in the trenches to leverage your expertise into successful, cost effective initiatives?

That’s a great question and one that we have been very deliberate about as we conceived the business from day one.  To your point, we wanted to be very careful to not create a business that wouldn’t scale beyond one person.  To that end, we have created a business model that enables our subject matter experts to leverage our content and intellectual property to create a consistent and repeatable experience for our clients when delivering our services.  Naturally, we are very critical about the quality of the folks we bring into our network and make sure that we are vetting them accordingly.  The IT industry is a rather close-knit group particularly for those with 25-30 years experience and it is pretty easy to reference check individuals as you typically know them or know someone who does.

You have alluded to the importance of an organization’s cultural readiness to adopt and benefit from technology. Can you discuss that further, and tell us how IT Ally can assist businesses in attaining the necessary level of cultural readiness?

It is true that viewing IT as a strategic weapon starts with the tone at the top of the leadership team. In small business, this is typically the owner, president, CFO or other leadership team member.  I have seen a wide-ranging view of the importance of technology over my career across different industries and size organizations and sometimes it does take an outside voice or an event to trigger this thinking. 

For example, some companies are more passive as it relates to information security until such time an unfortunate event occurs such as a breach of data, or vulnerability is exposed.  Or it could be a competitor that introduces a new application that dramatically changes the customer experience that threatens your very existence or value proposition.   

The role that IT Ally can play is to provide an outside in perspective that helps an organization to see technology differently – not just as an enabler to automate an existing process, or to increase productivity, but also a way to grow, differentiate and secure your business.  Much of this starts with taking a very fact based and data driven view, leveraging our IT Effectiveness assessments to create a baseline that can highlight potential weaknesses and areas for improvement.  Armed with this data and our experienced team, we can typically be very compelling in shifting this mindset. 

Michael, your response indicates that a successful technology agenda extends beyond infrastructure and software and permeates many areas of an enterprise. Do you see IT Ally providing services outside the traditional IT environment? If so / where might that be and how is IT Ally equipped and qualified to add value in meeting those needs?

Yes, we do and have been developing a network of other leaders that can support other functions such as Legal, Marketing, HR, Accounting and Sales.  In fact, these partners take a very similar approach to servicing their clients on a fractional basis, making it affordable for SMB’s to access these services on a demand basis.   These partners are very complementary to our business and allow us to provide a full spectrum of services to meet most of the needs of our clients.  In effect, we are all trusted advisors and become a valuable extension of the company’s leadership team. 

Tell us more about the partner ecosystem and how that is becoming an important asset to IT Ally and your clients. Do you see that continuing to expand nationally and internationally?

To that end we’ve also established a pretty extensive partnership network that ultimately extends what we do, that allows us to serve our clients more completely. So, where we don’t provide or don’t desire to provide those capabilities we’ve got companies in our portfolio of partners that would be happy to service them. Again, these are in areas that are in complementary businesses perhaps in other functional areas such as in legal services or HR.

But it enables IT Ally and my overall team to really provide a holistic view to business owners and help them in ways that go beyond the areas that we directly serve. So, the partner ecosystem is extremely important to us we are adding partners on almost a daily basis and coming in contact with organizations that want to engage and be a part of this overall ecosystem. 

Michael, / IF this discussion has raised the interest of SMB leaders who want to learn more or take next steps with IT Ally to assess their technology position and opportunities, what message would you leave them as to how to proceed?

I would say take us for a test drive.  Our offerings are priced in such a way that allows an organization to start small in an agile like fashion to experience our value proposition.  We are very confident that we can deliver value to our clients and welcome the opportunity to earn a position as a trusted advisor to their business. 

Thank you, Michael for a stimulating discussion and to you, our listener. Contact Michael Fillios and IT Ally at 844-4ITALLY or 844.448.4559 or email info@itallyllc.com.

[This article was originally published on itallyllc.com.]

SMBs need to use IT as a competitive advantage

When SMB chief executives ask themselves about the modern trends they need to be paying the most attention to, the first item that pops into my mind is how today’s lightning-fast technology changes are affecting every aspect of a business. Clearly, we have seen a number of innovative and emerging technologies surface recently—machine learning, artificial intelligence, robotics, big data, cloud computing, etc. It is difficult to choose just one!

However, I believe that the biggest trend is one regarding leadership and culture—specifically, how we think about the technology management vs. the technology itself. One sure thing about technology is that it will continue to evolve and outstrip the pace of technology management.

Technology Management is as important as the technology itself

Compared to other disciplines such as finance and accounting, technology management is in its infancy. As we have seen in the industry, there are new roles evolving that were not even in existence three or five years ago; roles such as data scientist, cloud architect, agile developer, and chief digital officer to name a few.

As IT leaders, we should never fall in love with the hottest current trend or technology, rather we should be thinking about how it will be used to solve a real business challenge. Technology for technology’s sake is never a good thing. This mindset and style of leadership is crucial, as the business/technology convergence becomes the norm regardless of the size of company, industry or geography.

Technology will always continue to evolve, disrupt and invent new ways of conducting business. Because of this, I believe that a business such as IT Ally™ will become even more important in advising SMBs on how to leverage technology to grow, secure, and ultimately differentiate their businesses. In my opinion, technology has leveled the playing field for SMBs such that size no longer dictates the survival of the fittest.

Numerous examples have played out over the past decade, whereby well-established, resourced and funded technology companies became extinct. This can be due to the availability of the technology and the uniqueness of the business model to which it is attached. Consider Netflix, Uber, Airbnb, Amazon, eBay, FB, Google and I am sure many more to come.

Business model innovation and disruption will continue everywhere and companies (large and small) will need to determine how to leverage technology as a strategic weapon as a means of survival. Organizations that can master the customer experience will be the ones who dominate their markets. Technology will be a key enabler to achieve this dominance and longevity.

Enterprise Perspective for the every day business

In my prior roles as a CIO in large global businesses, I was often responsible for technology transformations which included the creation of a multi-year, business-led IT strategy. In most instances, this also included large-scale modernization of legacy systems to improve both the customer and end-user experience, as well as adding new or enhancing existing digital capabilities to the IT infrastructure.

Although the strategies and the technologies were unique for each company, the playbook was the same in that I brought together a number of key business and IT stakeholders across multiple lines of business to create a roadmap for change.

Fundamentally this was about leadership, not technology. The result of this carefully planned transformational change ultimately served to differentiate us positively from our competition.

Technology trends that are leveling the playing field for SMBs

Regarding the latest technology trends for SMBs, the list looks similar to those I have seen in my past role as a CIO. For example, we see SMBs beginning to leverage artificial intelligence, data analytics, machine learning and robotics as key strategies to drive efficiency, scale and differentiation. Cloud adoption has become the platform for digital transformation. Cybersecurity risk is being proactively addressed and significant investment is being poured into improving the customer experience. Although access to this technology is becoming more available, it is a double-edged sword figuring out how to leverage it properly.

Assessing IT Management Maturity

For most large enterprises, IT Management is an evolving and ongoing challenge given the pace of technology change, the inherent complexity of business processes, entrenched legacy systems, data quality and ugh, I am exhausted just writing about it. When it comes to SMBs, IT Management is in its infancy, often relegated to a few individuals that are essentially building it on the fly.

This scenario creates an even bigger challenge given the outpacing of technology versus technology management. So what is an SMB owner to do about this? Our suggestion is to first take stock of your management maturity by conducting a formal assessment. This doesn’t have to be a science project but should have the breadth and depth of focus that is enterprise-grade, yet relevant for the SMB. 

I decided to start IT Ally with the simple mission of helping SMBs leverage technology to achieve their business objectives. This is not only a passion of mine but something that I believe is essential in the modern business landscape. I see this mission as of even greater importance to SMBs than their large corporate counterparts in terms of survival, growth and differentiation. My goal is to help fill this need.

If you’re interested in connecting with us, schedule a 30-minute consultation with one of our key advisors.

[This article was originally published on itallyllc.com.]