Many companies look towards their IT Provider for all their IT needs, whether it be buying hardware, software, consulting or cloud services.
The IT Provider typically will look after day to day operational support of the IT and the better ones will also do account planning or strategic road mapping on an annual or bi-annual basis.
The issue here is a simple one; this strategic roadmap or account planning is being carried out typically by a Sales Person who will have a sales target, and therefore is most likely aligned to the most recent product push or high margin service.
They will also typically have a small number of partners and will only sell their partners products and services, rarely evaluating them against other solutions as technology moves ahead.
When you look at their role in this way, it is very similar to an Independent Financial Advisor.
IFA’s are typically categorised by whether they offer a restricted set of products or alternatively the ‘whole of market’.
The difference between a Virtual IT Director and your IT Provider is that a Virtual IT Director are whole of market, but more importantly, they are retained directly by you as a consultant and therefore can be totally product and supplier agnostic.
A Virtual IT Director will not have a suite of products and services of their own, so they are able to be completely impartial and they have no incentive to push you into buying something that you don’t need or doesn’t meet your requirements.
By acting in this impartial manner, a Virtual IT Director is able to take the time to ascertain your actual business needs and make an informed and impartial recommendation.
A Virtual IT Director will normally spend time with your users to understand their frustrations and act as the “glue” to ensure that all suppliers to your business including telephony, infrastructure, cloud and business applications are all able to work seamlessly together.
So what could a virtual IT director do for your business?
Your current IT set-up will be assessed to see if it’s sufficient for your business as it is today, and going well into the future, and you’ll get cost-reduction advice and full support with deployment and supplier management.
A Virtual IT Director can run your IT supplier tender, manage existing relationships and ask the important questions to your suppliers to ascertain whether you are getting a good service and ultimately how you and the supplier can work better together.
To find out more about our Virtual IT Director Service, please email us on info@fusionconsult.co.uk
