If your company is too small to justify a full-time senior IT manager, a part-time CIO offers an affordable solution for developing and executing a comprehensive strategy to maximize the business value of your information system. If you have lost the services of a full-time CIO, a part-time expert can help your network stay productive as you qualify candidates for a permanent position.

MicroPrice can connect you with an IT management expert who can provide strategic direction to help you deploy appropriate technology to improve business processes so they align more closely with your corporate goals. By combining IT expertise with business management experience, a part-time CIO can help your company in these critical areas:

• Strategic planning. Create and implement a comprehensive growth strategy that leverages technology to help your company become a high-performance business. Develop a big picture that realistically defines your information network as a strategic business tool to give your organization a competitive advantage.
• Rationalizing and managing your IT budget. Understand which IT investments make business sense. Create models for Total Cost of Ownership, Return on Investment and Risk Management that relate to your short-term and long-term business strategy. Define an IT budget that supports business growth, and manage the budget in step with actual business results and perceived opportunities.
• Business process improvement and reengineering. Analyze current workflows and processes within your business and between your business and outside organizations. Use information technology to help you improve or redesign business processes in order to enhance collaboration with suppliers, partners and customers to maximize performance and achieve your business goals more quickly.
• Contract and vendor negotiations. Qualify vendors and evaluate products and services that support your business objectives and are in line with your IT budget. Negotiate contracts to maximize the business impact of your budgeted IT investments and to meet cash flow requirements. Monitor product performance guarantees, service level agreements, and special upgrade opportunities.
• IT security. Define a complete security strategy that covers security policies and procedures, a secure IT infrastructure, security monitoring and virus protection software for local and remote users, regular security patches, and emergency response plans for security breaches.
• Network management. Design and manage secure, cost-effective network framework that provides the performance, availability and expandability required to support your business objectives. Provide telecommuters and mobile workers with fast, reliable and secure connections. Use appropriate network monitoring software to anticipate problems, identify bottlenecks, and track usage.
• Desktop management. Develop and implement a comprehensive plan for desktop management that includes procedures for adding, moving and changing computers, help desk services, asset tracking, software revision control, configuration standards, automated management software, and support for mobile devices such as notebooks, PDAs and wireless products.
• Disaster recovery. Create and test a disaster recovery plan that includes analyzing the vulnerability of your network infrastructure and critical data, addresses disaster scenarios such as hardware failure, natural catastrophes or hacker attacks, defines backup procedures and backup system validation, describes an effective and affordable power backup system, specifies virus protection software, incorporates an appropriate level of system redundancy, and proposes off-site backup and recovery procedures.

MicroPrice can provide companies a professional consultant to act as a part-time CIO so that your business can develop and implement a well conceived IT strategy without incurring the cost of a full-time senior IT executive.