OUR vCIO Services
A Virtual Chief Information Officer, or vCIO, acts as a strategic advisor and technology partner for organisations, providing guidance, leadership, vision and expertise on your IT infrastructure. They are your go-to contact on all things technology related.
At Smile IT, our vCIO services provide high-level strategic advice by combining business expertise with technology consulting. We offer end-to-end services that align your IT strategy with business goals, secure your IT ecosystem, and offer strategic IT budgeting.
vCIO Services
Smile IT consulting begins with Business Intelligence. Business Intelligence involves the use of technology to analyse data and present information relevant to the client’s business.
This information can be used to improve decision making, identify potential cost savings and generate awareness of new business opportunities.
Business Intelligence systems can produce items such as interactive reports containing financial or other information, dashboards to display the current status of metrics and key performance indicators, comparisons between historic and current data, and the ability to display all of this information in real time from your computer or mobile phone.
Smile IT provides a top down, holistic approach to refining the client’s business IT strategy.
With the aim of making sure that the use of technology is aligned with the strategic goals for the business, and to identify the ways in which the use of technology can be improved to drive business outcomes.
Typically undertaken when the client requires a more comprehensive approach than the IT Strategy Planning service.
Enterprise architecture provides a structured approach to aligning IT capabilities with the strategic objectives.
Our approach is based on a scaled-down version of the TOGAF standard – an Enterprise Architecture methodology published by The Open Group.
Deliverables includes:
- ‘As is’ view of your technology platform
- ‘To Be’ recommended architecture
- Proposed roadmap (incorporating future projects and budget)
The creation of a business case, including:
- An assessment of a business problem or opportunity
- Benefits and risks from potential solutions
- Costs
- Timeframe
- Impact of implementation
This is an important process to make sure that the problem or opportunity to be addressed is clearly defined and that potential solutions are evaluated to ensure they will adequately address the problem or opportunity. Additionally, a business case can be used to justify allocation of resources or expenditure towards an IT project.
The aim of requirements analysis is to discover, analyse, define and document the criteria to meet a business objective.
Without undertaking requirements analysis, the solutions which are delivered may not match what was expected. The process identifies key stakeholders and works with them to define exactly what is required from a new product or service.
This can include functional, operational, technical and transitional requirements. Once the requirements have been properly defined, potential solutions can be assessed to determine suitability.
Selecting a new software solution is often a large commitment for a business, not only in purchasing of licenses, but in terms of staff training, data migration and potential risk of software which is a poor fit.
A formal software selection process can remove much of the risk associated with this process by:
- Analysing the business requirements for the software
- Identifying and researching possible solutions which meet requirements
- Assisting with decision making to ensure the software selected is able to meet the business requirements.
Content management relates to the administration of digital content throughout the lifecycle of the content.This includes creation of content, storage of content, publishing of content and archival or deletion of content.
Other aspects of content management to be considered are access control and version management. Content management can make use of Content Management Systems (CMS) and processes around the management of content.
A systematic approach to identifying, analysing and improving upon current practices.
The aim is to improve the value delivered by reducing or eliminating wastefulness in processes. This can be achieved by improving process effectiveness using techniques such as removing bottlenecks, removing steps which don’t add value to the process and making use of technology systems to optimise steps in the process.