A small public company spin-off was growing very rapidly in its third year of business, with offices distributed across the US. Its Information Technology (IT) staff was located across four offices, primarily focused on end-user and network operations support. Major business initiatives were delayed or troubled and the IT team was not cohesive.
Key business leaders were not experienced in IT management. Various IT team members had overlapping or conflicting responsibilities and often disagreed or collided in their efforts. Business analysts worked independently with internal clients to create incompatible solutions and the organization lacked a roadmap for system and information integration. The infrastructure was highly subject to outage and down-time without a solid disaster recovery or business continuity plan.
As acting CIO – and later as CIO – I led the realignment of the team’s resources, to insure key functions were supported and eliminate contradictory roles. I engaged the senior leadership team in IT strategic planning, including business continuity. The hardware infrastructure was moved to a solid co-location site; appropriate redundancy and continuity plans were instituted. An applications architecture and roadmap became the framework for adding features and functions to the business.
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As a result…
- The business grew well over 400% in a five-year period, enabled by its solid information and IT environment.
- The IT team adopted ‘best practices’ including Project Management Office (PMO), ITIL service models and agile deployments.
- When the business expanded globally, the solid IT framework supported and enabled the profitable and rapid expansion.
- And when the business was ultimately sold to private equity, the quality of its IT operations and systems helped to close the deal and add to the total value of the purchase.