Virtual CIO

Today’s ever-evolving technology impacts businesses of all sizes and industries. As technology lowers the barrier-of-entry for small businesses and creates new opportunities for large enterprises, business owners and IT leaders are consistently under pressure to find IT strategies and solutions that provide competitive edge and align with business strategy and opportunity.

For over a decade, Anchor IT has helped hundreds of organizations create winning IT strategies that have pushed their businesses to the next level. Our certified strategic IT consultants and CIO-level staff are always available to help you advance your business goals and initiatives. We provide the full range of strategic IT assistance to support specific IT projects or ventures, and we deliver expert insights and tools that prepare you for the future and help you maximize IT investments.

Find and fix problems fast with Anchor ITOM

In the fast-moving digital era, IT operations teams need to find and fix problems before the business feels the impact, and customer experience suffers. Anchor’s IT operations management helps your organization:

• Proactively identify and resolve performance and availability issues in a hybrid IT environment
• Identify norms and set baselines, reveal abnormalities, measure service impact, and identify risk to speed
• Simplify troubleshooting and remediation

Improve the user experience of applications you deliver and manage

When an application has performance issues or a customer has a bad experience with an application, IT operations is often the first to get a call about the problem. IT operations teams need to understand application performance and simulate user experience in the context of the IT infrastructure to:

• Pinpoint the source of the problem, from infrastructure to code to resource availability
• Understand the broader service impact of an application performance issue
• Proactively communicate with IT services, application owners, and development teams

When business is disrupted, it can cost money. Lost revenues plus extra expenses means reduced profits. Insurance does not cover all costs and cannot replace customers that defect to the competition. A business continuity plan to continue business is essential. Our business continuity plan includes four steps:

• Conduct a business impact analysis to identify time-sensitive or critical business functions and processes and the resources that support them.
• Identify, document, and implement to recover critical business functions and processes.
• Organize a business continuity team and compile a business continuity plan to manage a business disruption.
• Conduct training for the business continuity team and testing and exercises to evaluate recovery strategies and the plan.

Take Back Control Over IT

The ability to effectively manage complex, multi-vendor sourcing arrangements is becoming increasingly important in today’s business enterprises. In many cases, however, vendor management capabilities aren’t adequate to the challenge. As a result, business value erodes, service quality suffers and enterprises are exposed to operational and financial risk.

As a discipline, Vendor Management and Governance (VMG) is gaining boardroom attention for a number of reasons. At a high level, achieving more value from outsourcing is becoming a top priority. A sourcing strategy based on cost reduction alone is no longer sufficient, and executives are recognizing that an effective VMG function can enable the operational transparency and process consistency needed to drive business benefits such as enhanced data analytics and customer insight.

We guide our clients in the development of a true vendor management strategy that will align vendor success to business value, drive speed and efficiency with external partners, produce innovation that will enable new business models, and provide cost savings to fuel transformation.

Portfolio Management

Forward-thinking Business Leaders are deploying powerful decision analysis methodologies, along with portfolio optimization and visualization tools, to build discipline into the process of making IT spending decisions and to enhance communication among stakeholder groups. Used in concert, these tools and approaches act as a kind of Rosetta Stone that translates benefits, costs, and risks of proposed IT projects into a uniform set of facts and assumptions that can frame IT planning discussions, help build stakeholder consensus, and ultimately support better outcomes.

Anchor’s can generate the critical, targeted data needed to track progress on approved projects and, in some cases, alert stakeholders to problems. Moreover, it can help Business Leaders leverage scarce IT resources in ways that continually benefit stakeholders. “The IT group gets the direction and the resources it needs to deliver a product of which it can be proud. Business leaders get enhanced functionality, faster than expected. And the CFO sees greater cost efficiencies and enhanced value for investors.”

With new regulatory requirements and security standards presenting themselves at an accelerated rate, compliance becomes a higher priority for all of us. IT automation from Anchor IT can help you buck this trend. Automation lets IT operations teams proactively deal with inevitable compliance-related work.

• Automation meets the always-on IT compliance challenge.
• Synchronized policy enforcement at scale, over time requires automation.
• Automation makes preparing for audits faster and more cost effective.

Personnel costs typically represent the largest single budget line item in the IT organization. Therefore, effective IT management requires effective personnel management. Our research on IT staffing includes ratios and metrics that are useful in evaluating IT headcount levels, justifying IT staff increases, managing contingency IT staff (temporary IT employees and IT contractors), and managing IT employee relations.

Outside of salaries and general personnel costs, your budget needs to account for eight areas of spending in an IT department. Anchor IT can assist you with managing the following budgeting areas:

• Support Maintenance
• Hardware
• Software
• Cloud Services
• Backup, Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity
• Projects
• Discretionary Spending
• Training

Business Process Consulting

Our approach to Business Process Improvement delivers business value by creating a sustainable framework for improvement while establishing momentum for process excellence across the enterprise.

While often associated exclusively with Six Sigma, Centric leverages DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control) as the underlying business process improvement methodology. DMAIC is a proven, data-driven methodology. It can be scaled according to the scope and depth of your process improvement program.

RFP Development Services

The failure of countless IT implementations can be traced back to issues and gaps in the Request for Proposal (RFP) development and Vendor Selection process. Being accountable has always been a given, and with today’s technological speed, the stakes are high.

Don’t go it alone. Our IT systems and security experts will assist you in developing a customized Request for Proposal (RFP) document which outlines the requirements, specifications, systems and feature sets that you require. We’ll not only save your staff time, but assure the project comes in on budget with the right technology, and the right security and compliance criteria properly defined and addressed.

There’s nothing quite as frustrating as receiving a proposal that doesn’t address your needs. Once you know what you need, it’s often not so simple to get it. Our RFP Development services ensure you’re articulating your needs in a way that makes it possible for a solution provider to provide a meaningful response. A well-architected Request for Proposal (RFP) will describe your needs and existing situation thoroughly and accurately, helping maximize the chance that all of the proposals you ultimately receive will be worthy of consideration.

Our RFP Development services will reflect your needs in a precise and complete manner by:

1. Ensuring the quality of products and services that are to be delivered
2. Supporting you in the selection of an appropriate and compliant vendor
3. Negotiating terms and the lowest possible price
4. Ensuring the availability of support through a comprehensive Service Level Agreement (SLA), when appropriate
5. Ensuring the legality of your RFPs and compliance with authorities and policies
6. Simplifying a complex and time-consuming process

When it’s time to invite proposals and select a vendor, choose the company that understands your industry and functional requirements, demonstrates their expertise in RFP development and vendor selection, and has a track record of success. Choose Anchor IT’s RFP Development services.

We conduct interviews and focused dialog with executives and stakeholders. The main purpose of these interviews is to understand how technology is needed in your business, and how it is ultimately used. Our approach is flexible and considers your organization’s culture, IT environment, systems, business operations, and priorities.

We seek to understand all facets of your business in order to complete the most accurate, detailed and effective assessment. Our interview inquiries will include:

• The state of the business
• Key initiatives
• Business strategy alignment
• Strategic use of technology
• Desired goals and results 

We conduct interviews and focused dialog with key department heads and process owners to learn:

• What’s working, what’s not
• Workflow
• Ideas and concerns 

We conduct interviews and focused dialog with internal and external IT teams to learn:

• What working, what’s not
• Resource management
• Business alignment
• Ideas and concerns 

All-inclusive IT Analysis:

We perform a comprehensive end-to-end infrastructure analysis. Our team employs software agents and centralized software performance monitoring tools to gather data for the client LAN and WAN. The IT infrastructure assessment consists of a thorough review of your IT infrastructure, business processes and controls.

• Use of Technology
• Capacity
• Performance
• Cybersecurity (Available as a separate standalone assessment)
• Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity (Available as a separate standalone assessment)
• Policies, Procedures, Governance 

What you receive:

• Scorecard and model
• Onsite findings presentation by an ISACA Certified Auditor. Generally, there are two presentations – one for the technical staff, the other for the executives.
• An Executive Summary for nontechnical stakeholders
• Comprehensive, detailed findings delivered digitally and physically   
• Interview objectives, themes, barriers, Mind Maps
• Recommendations and solution options