vCIO services and IT roadmaps for El Paso businesses

A vCIO from TechBit Solutions gives an El Paso business the technology planning, roadmap and budget a full-time IT director would produce, without employing one.

Call (915) 629-8888

What a vCIO does

A vCIO is the person who thinks about your technology beyond this week. TechBit Solutions provides that role to El Paso businesses that need the planning without the salary of a full-time IT director.

Day-to-day support keeps things working. A vCIO decides what you should be doing next year, what it will cost, and what happens if you do nothing.

Who it is for

• A business between roughly ten and two hundred staff, too big to improvise and too small for an IT director
• An owner making technology decisions on instinct and would rather not
• A company that keeps being surprised by costs it could have seen coming
• A business planning a move, a second site, an acquisition or a large hiring push
• Any organization whose insurer, auditor or largest customer has started asking about IT

What is included

• A quarterly review of what is working, what is failing, and what changed
• A written technology roadmap covering the next twelve to thirty-six months
• An annual budget with real numbers, split between running costs and projects
• An asset and license register, so renewals are not a surprise
• Risk review: what would hurt most, how likely it is, what it costs to reduce
• Vendor review, including whether you are paying for things nobody uses
• Plain-language reporting you can take to a board, a bank or an insurer

Building the roadmap

1. We start with the business, not the technology. Where is it going, how fast, and what would get in the way.
2. We assess what you have against where you are going, and mark the gaps.
3. We rank the gaps by what they would actually cost you, not by how interesting they are.
4. We put dates and prices against them and spread them across quarters.
5. We review it every quarter, because plans made a year ago stop being true.

The technology budget

Most businesses of this size have an IT budget that is really a memory of what last year cost plus a bit.

A proper budget separates what it costs to keep running from what it costs to improve, and shows hardware replacement as a schedule rather than a series of shocks. That single change makes technology spending predictable, which is usually what the owner wanted all along.

The problem it solves

Without someone doing this, technology decisions get made by whoever is in the room when something breaks. That produces a collection of individually reasonable choices that do not fit together.

It also means nobody is watching the slow risks: the software going out of support, the certification a customer will demand next year, the server that will need replacing in the same quarter as the roof.

What a quarterly review looks like

It is ninety minutes, and you leave with a document rather than an impression.

• What broke last quarter, how often, and whether the same thing keeps happening
• What the technology actually cost against what was budgeted
• Which items on the roadmap moved, which slipped, and why
• Anything new: a regulation, a customer requirement, a piece of software going out of support
• What we recommend for the coming quarter, with prices, ranked

Nothing in that list requires you to know anything technical. If a recommendation cannot be explained in plain language and justified in business terms, it is not ready to be made.

Getting started

The first session is a two-hour conversation about the business. See also IT consulting and pricing.

Call TechBit Solutions at (915) 629-8888.

Questions we get asked

What does vCIO stand for?

Virtual chief information officer. You get the planning and budgeting a full-time IT director would give you, without carrying one on payroll. The work is real; only the job title is part-time.

How is this different from IT consulting?

Consulting is usually a project with an end. A vCIO relationship keeps going, and the value comes from knowing your business well enough to see what is coming a year out and tell you before it arrives.

How often would we actually meet?

Quarterly suits most businesses this size, with a longer session once a year for the budget. If something significant is happening, we meet more often, and because we are in El Paso we can do it across a table rather than over video. We are not going to hold you to a calendar that does not match your year.

Do we have to be a managed IT client?

It is not a strict requirement, but it works far better if we are already in the environment. Otherwise half of every meeting goes on establishing facts instead of making decisions, and you are paying for the wrong half.

Will you recommend things you also sell?

Sometimes, and we will say so out loud when that is the case. We will also tell you when the right answer is to keep exactly what you have, or to buy it from somebody else. You should expect that from anyone advising you.