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.]
