Regardless of the industry you are in, having a strategic plan on how to use technology is crucial to your company. A flower shop needs to make sure inventory exists, there is a consistent paying method for everyone from folks who walk in off the street, to the ultra-efficient people who sit on their couch and send flowers to their mom for Mother’s day. Once you’ve got those things in place, the world of flower shops doesn’t change much – but the technology does. There is PCI compliance to contend with (moving target); there are unique vendor and technology challenges that will pop up; there is still an element of hardware failing and a disaster recovery plan needs to exist. If you run 2,000 flower shops – imagine what your back office IT department would look like – just much more complicated, right?

It’s possible that your CTO is focused on a very specific piece of the puzzle, perhaps they are focused on the applications that your company develops and sells. They manage the development team and are managing the technology that the applications live on. The CIO role is missing, perhaps the CTO isn’t doing the CIO role – or you need to find a way to fill that CIO role. There are many ways to outsource the CIO role in a fractional role. Finding someone who is versed in this role and responsibility could guide you through a Strategic Workshop, help your create the Business Technology Roadmap and help you stay on track to implement improvements and guide you to a more successful and competitive company.

The CIO, whether in house or on a fractional basis, is the right person to be involved in your business and help you create this plan. With their expertise in working in this role with other companies, even if in different industries, they bring the value to getting a baseline of your business. From there, the CIO or vCIO would guide you through a strategic IT planning meeting, map out the roadmap of improvements and be there to facilitate the quarterly meetings and make sure everyone is on track at the end of the meeting.

After the strategic meeting, everyone should receive a copy of the plan. The plan should consist of 3 major parts – The list of projects, identified by when they will be take place and the budget wrapped around it. Before full scale implementation, you may have a few items on the list that are critical and should be addressed. It’s probably a smart idea to get the plan settle in with everyone before implementing it. Is there any changes that need to be communicated to the rest of the team? Any changes for clients or vendors? Of course, with any project – there should be an itemized project plan, budget outline and identify the people whom which this project may affect and communicate to them the plan in order to keep everyone on the same page.

This is a great question – and if you go so far as to identify the right person to lead you on this journey, and set aside the time to have the strategic planning meeting and spend the effort to create the roadmap – you damn sure better have a way of identifying progress. This question is easy to answer, but requires skill to do properly. Each item on the roadmap really should have an in-depth conversation on budget, priority, who it affects. Once that is identified, we should use that as the guide to finding out how the that particular project has succeeded. In order to track total progress, we should only only see our ‘score’ increase – but you should see efficiencies with your eye. Sales takes less time to convert, operations takes less touches to complete, AR comes in faster, etc.

I’d review this page a few times, gather up all of the items that make sense for you and your company and just start. Hold a meeting with your leadership team, invite your IT guy (regardless of expertise). Start here. Starting is the important piece.