CIO Advisory
We provide an adaptable, trusted-advisory role for our clients: engaging CIOs and/or their direct reports in a part-time collaboration, typically 2-3 days a month, spread across the month.
We understand that CIOs have ever-increasing challenges with which to contend (outlined in I'm a CIO...). It can be lonely at the top: being confident, showing confidence to your staff, balancing all those challenges, and more. Even with an effective leadership team, they can sometimes be too close. It is, therefore, useful to have an independent advisor, with well-rounded experience, who can help by:
- Asking the stupid questions
- Seeing the bigger picture at a greater distance
- Enabling you to better "see the wood for the trees"
- Providing game-changing options you may not have considered.
Similarly, whereas [expensive] consultancies may only engage for initial transformations, often done to you rather than with you, we engage to guide you while embedding capabilities and improving maturity and culture.
You benefit from full experience at fractional cost and risk.
Your IT organization should enable & drive rather than just service business.
What do we do?
We bring our consulting experience, knowledge and listening/problem-solving techniques to work with you to:
- Facilitate the strategic debate
- Align teams to common goals
- Evaluate creative ideas through a strategic lens
- Shape actionable strategic plans
- Facilitate the process of creativity and innovation
- Deliver outcomes through collaboration
We achieve this by switching between the different advisory modes of coach, mentor (or consultant*) as most applicable for the situation at hand.
* Consultancy services typically require longer, deeper & broader engagement. They are therefore not typically part of a CIO Advisory engagement. However, any such requirement will be discussed at the time...and you will have the benefit of continuity of services.
| Different Advisory Modes | Coach | Mentor | Consultant |
|---|---|---|---|
| Focus of Work | Deals with the present | Focuses mainly on development of the individual | Deals with problems, provides expertise |
| Relationship | Coach helps client discover own answer | Mentor has the answer | Consultant has the answer |
| Process | Collaborates with client, who remains accountable | Observes & provides guidance | Evaluates a situation and advises |
How do we do it?
- We listen & adapt to you, your challenges, opportunities & needs.
- We do not recommend solutions, without establishing underlying problems, root causes and options.
- We challenge: definitions, assumptions, and end-to-end traceability from Board to Customer (e.g. strategies, policies, frameworks, standards, processes, or controls).
- For the oft-overlooked People dimension (frameworks & methodologies only really address Process and Technology dimensions), we deploy the Game-Changing Index (aka The GC Index®) for an individual, team or wider level. This improves understanding, alignment and natural energies to maximize business impact.
- We tailor recommendations to suit, and/or work with you to embed them.
Typical Situations
As part of our own Capability Maturity Model from our own experience our clients had faced, we have identified typical situations or problems that you may have observed in your own organization.
The below is just a sample of some of the challenges that our clients had encountered before engaging, often not even realizing the root cause(s), just the symptoms, until we have engaged:
