What We Do
IT Leadership: vCIO + TAM
Where Technology Meets Business
Mission Critical Alignment
Getting technology to properly support key business objectives is far easier said than done. Business success and technology effectiveness are both exceedingly difficult to achieve from different (almost opposite) directions, and it takes a particular set of skills to bridge those worlds.
Our clients tend to know fairly clearly what business outcomes they want, but getting clear on what technology can best support those outcomes can be something of a "telephone game" with critical details and intent lost along the way.
At the highest level, our ability to get to proper alignment depends on two roles within WineryConnect:
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The Virtual Chief Information Officer (vCIO)
A CIO is, most fundamentally, a businessperson. Someone who understands profit and loss and long-range business planning. At the same time, the CIO needs to understand clearly what technology is capable of and where common sense and business acumen are more important than bits and bytes. Most small to mid-sized businesses can't afford to have a dedicated CIO on staff, which is where the vCIO role comes in. A seasoned CIO can support multiple organizations as a vCIO, particularly when the organizations in question all fall within a single vertical market.
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The Technology Alignment Manager
A TAM is the flip-side of a vCIO. A TAM is most fundamentally a technology person, but they have enough experience in a given industry, and enough exposure to business challenges, that they can effectively work with a vCIO to take business/technology strategy and translate that into actionable technology roadmaps and initiatives.
SAM WEINER - vCIO
WineryConnect's Founder, Sam is a 30+ year veteran of the software industry with a focus on Enterprise Application Integration and Enterprise Architecture. For most of his career, Sam has worked with large organizations with deep pockets which can afford their own dedicated IT department and custom software development to keep themselves maneuverable and to gain competitive advantage. Sam has also been a start-up entrepreneur, worked in middle-management at large organizations, and been a partner in several business ventures.
One of Sam's primary responsibilities in WineryConnect is to work with our clients on the Big Picture of their business, helping them characterize and understand the information they need to have the firmest grasp on (their Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs) in order to understand how they are doing relative to core business objectives.
KEELAN HATHAWAY - TAM
For over 10 years Keelan has worked closely with winery staff to understand what challenges they face on a day-to-day basis and to learn how technology can best help them. Keelan has learned from experience what technologies work best at an implementation level, and he's worked with Sam (his father) to make sure those technologies align with client business objectives.