Every new year means new challenges and new opportunities. This new year, 2023 is no different! When we asked 204 C-level executives for their 2023 predictions, their responses reflected five clear business trends:
Let’s take those one at a time.
Did you just buy new tech for your company? Congratulations! Now, it’s time to start thinking about an upgrade.
So says David Mitchelhill, a long-time interim Chief Technology Officer.
Mitchelhill, who served in various CIO roles at organizations like Klarna, Freeletics, and the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Justice, is a sharp-tongued critic of everything from Salesforce to Microsoft to company owners who don’t take the time to learn about and understand technology.
By the time a company’s technology solution is a year old “it’s already decrepit,” he says.
The speed of technology development is doubling every year. Companies that don’t have AI-driven decision-making are now too late for three reasons:
1. Difficulty acquiring complex knowledge
2. Scarce talent expertise
3. Time to interweave AI-driven knowledge into the company’s fabric
Crypotcurrency. NFTs. Bitcoin. Blockchain. They’re the hip new financial products and all the cool kids are talking about them. As many as 40 million have invested in them.
But what are cryptocurrencies and how will they affect the way you run your business in the future?
We talked to Stephen Meade, founder of TheBullsEyeGuy.com, who shared his expertise in a cryptocurrency 101 tutorial. In this beginner’s guide, he explains what cryptocurrencies are, explodes some myths about what they’re good for and helps you understand how you may use them to manage your business in the future.
Let’s dive in.
It’s a common scenario: A company spends the money to delve into a massive ERP implementation only to get stalled, Or worse, flounder and fall flat (and lose big bucks in the process).
Maybe it’s the lack of planning or software curation. Maybe it’s not thinking ahead for future needs. It might also boil down to not having the right talent to make that integration sing.
For all that goes into ERP implementation — ERP, or Enterprise Resource Planning, is, after all, managing, streamlining and tying together all the most essential parts of a business — strategizing every step should be a nonnegotiable.
“ERP systems usually get replaced every seven to 10 years. I’ve been with some companies where they hadn’t replaced them for 25 years,” says Bruce Howard, an InterimExecs RED Team member and Interim CIO who has spent much of his career implementing ERP systems.
“There’s a planning phase to bring all of the pieces together and make sure you’ve got a clear approach and clear people assigned. And then you need a methodology for the way you select systems and implement.”
To better understand the components of a successful ERP implementation and strategy, how an ERP can support business operations and better decision making, and how bringing in a veteran can elevate the process, we asked Howard along with interim executives Tony DeLima and Alonso Vargas to walk us through the essential elements.
It took just one leaked password to breach Colonial Pipeline in the May 2021 cyberattack.
A few months earlier, in March, more than 30,000 U.S. organizations were hit by hackers who used Microsoft Exchange to gain access to email accounts.
In June a cyberattack took down the IT systems at JBS meat processing plant, resulting in the temporary closure of all nine of its U.S. locations.
These headlines are just a fraction of the recent cyberattacks on companies. And experts say we’re in for a long, vulnerable ride.
According to Cybercrime Magazine, ransomware attacks against businesses will occur every 11 seconds this year and cause $6 trillion in damages. By 2025, the grand total is expected to hit $10.5 trillion annually.
That’s why it’s not enough to build a response-to-recovery playbook. Organizations have to have thorough, vise-like cyberattack prevention measures in place to ensure it’s (mostly) business as usual.
“Incident and crisis management are the key pieces—business continuity is the umbrella,” InterimExecs RED Team executive and CISO, Zeeshan Kazmi says. “But who’s taking care of all the other stuff? Recovery without formal plans can’t blunt the impact. But with a plan, you face an initial crisis and recover from it. And then pretty quickly, you’ll come back.”
Here he breaks down the background on ransomware, the impact of cyberattacks, how to protect your company, and a step-by-step guide if—gulp—you’ve been hit.
No matter the industry, size, or scope, every business has to be wary of the f-word: fraud. We know virtually any department from marketing to HR is vulnerable, and the extra scrutiny typically targets finance and accounting — think embezzlement, payroll fraud, or fictitious revenue. But with the exponential growth of IT budgets‚ this unassuming area has become ripe for liabilities.
A top interim CIO from InterimExecs RED Team who has led complex IT turnarounds for Fortune 500 companies shares the warning signs of IT fraud and how to mitigate the risks.
The financial services sector has undergone significant changes in recent years.
Banks used to look at technology with hostility. According to fintech and payments expert Peter Tapling, “Five years ago, if we were to have this conversation, I would have told you that the banks look at fintech as a very much us vs. them – whatever they do is stuff that we could do.”
In other words, financial services companies saw fintech companies as competitors who could take business away from them. These days however, financial institutions are eager to embrace fintech.
Tapling, who spent 15 years as CEO of authentication provider Authentify before advising a range of financial services companies, says the industry is “shifting a lot.” Integral to this mindset shift is that financial institutions are ready to partner with fintech companies so they can offer new services and penetrate new markets.
Looking at the rationale behind this, Tapling talks about the difficulty around large organizations building new bank initiatives. To that end he says, “If you look at the way we do development these days — fail fast, build something small, minimum viable product — that’s not the way a big bank works.”
Instead, banks look to partnerships to fill in that gap.
Whether your category is eCommerce, automotive, health care or anything in between, to stay ahead in today’s marketplace, every company now has to also double as a technology company. The role of technology in business impacts everything from website user experience and cybersecurity to inventory management and data reporting, each vital in helping a business scale and succeed more efficiently.
“Most companies can and do manage their money and people, which is a necessity,” says Chief Information Officer (CIO) David Mitchelhill. “But unfortunately, quite often they abstain from understanding the technology, which is basically the IP of their company. If you think of a company as a building, the people you need to design the building so that it will stand up to every storm are totally different from the people who run it on a daily basis. Companies need to hire the architects.”
But navigating a force this disruptive requires strategy that isn’t just efficient, goal-oriented, and competitive, but flexible enough to adapt with rapid changes, too. So we asked Mitchelhill and fellow CIO Kevin Malover to break down the components of a technology roadmap, the value of an outsider’s perspective, and why staying agile is the key to success.
There are plenty of new challenges to keeping a company afloat while the world endures the 2020 coronavirus pandemic. Here are just a few:
Add to the list a new one: Cyber security threats to business.
InterimExecs RED Team executive and CISO, Zeeshan Kazmi, says times like these are prime for opportunistic hackers.
Just look at financial technology company, Finastra, to see a cyber security nightmare in action. After coronavirus hit, the company was in the middle of developing an emergency plan to operate when hackers found a backdoor into their servers. Malware quickly spread locking down server after server on their network, taking down many of their customers which include 90 of the world’s top 100 banks.
“We haven’t taken cyber security threats as seriously as they should be taken,” says Kazmi, who has spent 15 years working in the cyber security space. “Companies have been reactive. They protected their business transactions and their reputation. It became a corporate risk management function.”
The COVID-19 pandemic has changed our lives in ways that seemed unimaginable just a short time ago. Within a matter of weeks schools have been shuttered, sporting events and conferences have been canceled, air travel has ground to a halt, over 16 million workers have been laid off, and those able to work from home are now doing so almost exclusively.
Commentators are already proclaiming that coronavirus will permanently change the world. Many of the expected shifts, however, are hardly new. They were nascent prior to coronavirus and emerging stronger than ever due to the pandemic-led paradigm shift.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the migration to remote work and the technologies that enable it. In the United States almost a quarter of employed individuals already were working remotely, and while this trend has steadily increased over the past decade, with coronavirus forcing millions to work remotely, we may have reached a tipping point.
If remote work is indeed the new normal, how can businesses embrace it? Alonso Vargas and Andrew Andrews-Ramirez provide digital transformation, helping organizations with everything from ERP implementation to outsourcing, to migrating to cloud technology, utilizing platforms including NetSuite, SAP, Salesforce, Hubstaff, and Office 365. They have seen a shift in how organizations are operating and have keen insights into how companies can get ahead in the digital curve.
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