The failure occurs when either the business owner/management assumes the "computer guy" understands his business - from a strategic standpoint, or when the business owner/management is certain the "computer guy" doesn’t understand his business and therefore excludes him from the strategic conversations.

In the role of Virtual CIO/Technology Advisor, I provide the strategic go-between for business management and IT departments or technical vendors.   Bridging that gap can result a huge cost savings and reduce future headaches.

Case-Study:
A client of mine was getting ready to initiate a series of system-wide upgrades - both hardware and software.  I was brought in to evaluate the vendor proposals for completeness & competitiveness - did they achieve the desire results.

However, as I sat there discussing the business objectives, current challenges, and business growth plans, the VP of Finance and the Controller (charged with managing the upgrade and approving the purchases) both commented that my conversations with them were the first where we started to identify their business objectives.

The vendors had identified current technology and for the most part were quoting/proposing upgrades to the existing infrastructure - based on past technology, not an future business growth.

In the case of this upgrade, we discovered nearly $100,000 of unnecessary purchases and by the time we had re-evaluated their strategic plans, we had reduced spending by nearly $150,000 and created a 2 year strategic plan.

It isn’t really the cost-savings that is most profound, it is the fact that the purchases they made actually had a value-impact on their organization.  The net effect is greater than the cost savings.

They way I explain it is that they had been given a grocery list but did not have a recipe.   In fact, what I told them at the outset was that I could not promise them we would reduce cost - only that the cost we identify would be part of a recipe; they would be purchases of strategic value.

Are you creating grocery list without a recipe?