Utilizing a consulting agency for CIO Services offers benefits to many companies. Advantages associated with hiring a consulting firm to act as your CIO relate to: cost-effectiveness, efficiency, expertise, and level of integration.
Cost Effectiveness
The average salary for an executive level IT position (CIO, Director of IT, VP of IT), in Atlanta GA, is over $155,000/yr. This easily places the total compensation for that employee over $170,000/yr after benefits, bonuses, and other associated costs. The Information Technology job market is highly competitive, yet often resulting in higher salaries and turn-over rates.
Utilizing a consulting firm mediates these concerns. Our service fees are based on a fractional calculation of the market average for your area. The contract is considered an operating expense, billed monthly, without the additional overhead associated with benefits, bonuses and various employment costs.
Efficiency
As with any new hire, these positions also have the disadvantage of lengthy training and on-boarding phases. Transitioning CIOs often results in a 12-16 month lag time, which impacts cost through loss of efficiency.
Multiple consultants will be assigned to each account, under a lead, ensuring that efficiency is never lost in the event of personnel changes. The Lead Consultant will serve as the primary point-of-contact for your team. This individual will attend stakeholder and management meetings, present QBRs, and review every piece of information that is distributed to your team.
Expertise
Many organizations spend months looking for the correct CIO to fit their needs. This often leads to looking for a “unicorn” that has the proper amount of work experience and is also qualified in an area that is specific to your company’s needs. For example, your company may be looking for an individual with 10-15 years management experience that will also be capable of reviewing programming code in a specific language.
The benefit to leveraging a CIO consulting agency, is that we are able to utilize many consultants with different specializations. We are continuously expanding our team to cover these specialized needs. The advantage is that multiple highly qualified team members will be strategizing with your team to form the best plan of action in every case.
Level of Integration
Level of Integration: This is a key element that many virtual CIO (vCIO) and consulting agencies often miss the mark on. Many CIO’s are often asked to provide hands-on work (developing, database management, server support, etc), to reach max utilization. This can be due to a lack of budget to hire a specialized individual but is often attributed to the CIO having additional capacity after management duties. If you find your team in this situation, it may be more beneficial to consider partnering with a consulting agency to provide CIO services.
Right Hand Advising will partner with your company to provide CIO consulting services, leaving room in the budget to properly hire or outsource the needed hands-on functions to a specialist. Our staff will act as a C-Suite employee of your organization, always with your best interests in mind and decisions backed by proven data. Check out our list of services that we will perform as the role of your CIO here.