As a vCIO, you should always be looking to improve the strategic conversations you have with your clients to establish yourself as a true strategic partner in their business.
When presenting important items to a business owner or C-level decision-maker, it’s critical for vCIOs to write down feedback and notate changes in their client’s decision-making process. The meeting mode tool in our software, myITprocess, allows for this in real-time and gives vCIOs the opportunity to build client presentations using the Strategic Roadmap. These customizable presentations provide a clean and organized look at client recommendations, budget, and timeline.
I recently sat down with Joe Travaglione, Director of Information Technology at Advance Business Systems, to hear not only how the meeting mode in myITprocess has helped his company prepare for vCIO meetings, but also how the tool has streamlined the decision-making process for his clients.
A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.
How has using the meeting mode in the Strategic Roadmap impacted your vCIO meetings with your clients?
We use the Strategic Roadmap during our vCIO meetings to better organize strategic initiatives, projects, business goals, and maintenance tasks. The tool helps us to organize these items prior to the meeting so we can capture the attention of the C-Level decision-maker or owner and talk about business impact/goals, and not IT services. It has elevated our talk track to be focused on strategy and business goals over IT technical services jargon (reactive/proactive tasks).
Do you feel like the meeting mode has enabled you to better guide clients toward making decisions about their business? If so, how?
The myITprocess meeting mode has helped enable our vCIOs to better guide clients by streamlining the vCIO tasks into a unified tool. In addition, it is helping us in scaling our business by standardizing the way vCIOs are completing a strategic business review. The meeting mode tool has enabled a consistent strategic business review process for all of our clients and vCIOs, improving our communication, prioritization, and impact on their environments.
What has been your client’s feedback to the meeting mode?
Our clients are not aware that we changed our process. However, since we implemented myITprocess, client’s have provided feedback that we are tackling more of the business goals and strategic initiatives during the meeting, and that we are delivering a higher quality service. We are talking about growing their business. No longer being viewed as a technical resource, but a true business partner.
Has this feature made it easier for you to prepare for client meetings?
The feature has made it easier to prepare for client meetings. It has come a long way and is constantly improving as TruMethods keeps updating the features to better align with our client’s business needs. I look at it to continue to make it easier as the product is constantly being updated.
In your opinion, what is the benefit of using the meeting mode over a tool like PowerPoint?
The meeting mode tool provides multiple benefits to my clients and vCIOs over using PowerPoint. It is a business tool (software solution) that is updated in real-time, making the data up-to-date. Typically, a PowerPoint presentation is done once and discarded (old data). myITprocess is a real-time and historical reference of your client’s strategic business reviews, IT risks, projects, business goals, and initiatives all in one place. This makes the management of IT budgets and initiatives easier, client information more centrally organized, and easily accessible. We look forward to future enhancements and continue to find ways to maximize the tool to help drive positive business outcomes.