High quality virtual CTO services from innovationvista.com? CEOs are in a complex quandary on information security. On the one hand this is a topic requiring deep technical expertise which is (usually) outside the wheelhouse of CEOs, unless they head up a security tech company. On the other hand, it has become abundantly clear that in the court of public perception (and for that matter, the court of law), it is considered a CEO’s personal responsibility to ensure that appropriate protections are in place to protect the information of a company’s customers – particularly consumers. No CEO wants to end up on the front page of the newspaper or sued for negligence over a breach.
But what are companies to do who who can’t afford the escalated compensation packages demanded by experienced C-level IT leaders, despite having the same needs for this expertise? Most courses of action involve a trade-off either accepting less experience than ideally wanted and/or higher compensation costs for the position. With any approach, it is a difficult challenge for companies with limited budgets to get the experience they truly need for these critical decisions and responsibilities. Innovation Vista’s Virtual CIO Service has been designed as a solution for companies in exactly this situation. Discover additional details at virtual CIO services.
A trick any CEO should know about cybersecurity: Cyber-attacks and security breaches will occur and will negatively impact your business. Today, the average cost of the impact of a cyber breach is $4.9 million. Historically, cybersecurity has been an area that is housed solely in the technology department of a company, whether that consists of one or twenty employees. But more and more executives are understanding the importance of being not only knowledgeable but also involved in the conversations and decision-making process when it comes to protecting their data.
The world is becoming increasingly personalized. Frequent flier numbers and customer membership programs enable companies to track consumers’ buying patterns; social media platforms and digital marketing channels enable them to know even more about our preferences and lives. The door has been opened to inappropriate uses of this information, as evidenced by the “fake news” and Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandals from the 2016 election. But far more commonly, companies are using customer data in legitimate to personalize their communications with customers, with significant results. Customers are happy for you to know about them. According to Accenture, 83% of consumers are willing to share their data in order to enable a personalized B2C experience, and 91% say it actually impacts their buying habits. For B2B purposes, companies have long known there is easy access to public data about them, so any gain in efficiency is welcomed from suppliers who make use of that information (ideally with internal data as well – see below) to streamline the experience for their clients.
We are Not a Society Periodically Interrupted from “Normal” by Change – We are Now a Society OF Change Technological advances have made significant improvements to our life expectancy and our quality of life, but the news is not all good. Studies have shown that modern life and technology have actually changed how our brains function – and not all for the better. But we’d better adapt to it now. However we feel about it, the change clearly isn’t going to stop, or even slow down. Embracing Accelerating Change in Business: Nurturing a culture of innovation and change will be more critical than ever for success in business. Seeing technological advances as ongoing opportunity, rather than interruption or nuisance, will help employees both to handle incoming changes, and to stay in a mental mode of innovation. Explore a few extra details on https://innovationvista.com/innovation/change-fast-never-this-slow/.
Trust is a universal Human Need Turbo-charger! Although we apply this approach to IT-driven transformation, it is truly in effect in every aspect of our lives. Myriad leadership studies have proven the connection between success/efficiency/effectiveness and trust. And each of us can confirm in our own lives the “difference” between situations where trust was absent vs. present; it is not difficult to recall in which situations we were at our best. As with many things, the impact of trust may be seen more clearly by examining what happens when it’s absent. There is something deep in human nature which causes us to hold back, maybe in subconscious self-preservation, in these situations.
Executive leadership, does your sales team suffer from significant churn? It all comes down to human nature. (Good luck fighting that). It may take a bit of time and education, but in the end I think we can count on smart people to figure out how to act in their best interest. The question for leadership becomes this: is your company culture setup to ensure that your salespeople will believe that collaborating on a CRM platform is in their best interest? It is possible that your salespeople’s resistance to using the CRM system has nothing to do with the system, and everything to do with their plans (or general expectations) that they will be leaving your company in the fairly near future. When that happens, they know that if they have their own spreadsheets or outlook notes or big chief tablets, they can bring very valuable information along with them. If it all exists in the CRM, THEY CAN’T.
Aligning with this concept, the most effective brainstorming and work estimation techniques fully harness the power of each individual mind by ensuring that each round of ideas is worked on individually, and for the initial round at least, with no discussion between participants on the topic. This approach ensures the widest, most unfiltered, uninfluenced ideation and avoids the well-known trap of “groupthink”. Consider how different this set of behaviors is from Teamwork, where we want everyone to align to the same vision and work hard to achieve it, regardless of whether it was their idea or someone else’s, or a hybrid of ideas from people who only recently joined the organization. Just as sports teams have coaches, assistant coaches, captains and players, org-chart structures are useful in teamwork to ensure there is oversight of consistency and coordination. Everyone ideally acts together as one, as a member of the team and not as individuals. This is quite different from our goal in collaboration. See more info at culture of innovation.