Motseng Investment Holdings, one of South Africa’s fastest growing diversified investment groups has appointed CXO Advisor to oversee their IT investment and strategy.
Ipeleng Mkhari the group COO points out, “With our growth over the past few years, we found that the management of our IT required a focused and professional management. The problem we found was that we needed a variety of IT roles to be filled, not all of which would be required full time. We just could not justify employing our own management team.”

The CXO Advisor service model has been package to solve just this problem faced by Motseng. Craig Terblanche, Managing Director of CXO Advisor explains, “Motseng required the business skills of a CIO, to build the business supporting IT strategy, governance framework and negotiating capability, but also the skills of an IT architect, the skills of an IT service manager. These skills will be required at different levels of intensity as Motseng grows and matures its use of IT.”

This is a common problem faced by Mid-sized companies in the South African market; they just cannot afford the costs associated with hiring a full time IT management team with the necessary skills to fill all the required roles. The result is often a compromise, the company appoints an individual who has to fill all the required roles. The problem these skill sets are rarely found in one individual. The consequences of which is that the company finds key areas of their IT being totally neglected causing much management frustration and the common lament, “IT is a “black hole” and costing me too much!”

The benefit of the CXO Advisor Service model according to Mkhari is that their costs amount to one IT management resource but we get all the required IT Management roles fulfilled. “The business impact has been marked, we have had improved ITs reliability, we now have proper IT strategy planning and controls and importantly have confidence that IT will now support our business growth and importantly our client requirements” Mkhari adds.

“In addition,” Mkhari concludes, “The way CXO Advisor communicates –in business terminology that we executives can understand, their independent advice, which is backed by Datamonitor and OVUM research, gives the executive management and the board the comfort that our IT decisions are sustainable and value for money”

With the shortage of IT Management skills, high costs of retaining these skills, CXO Advisor believes that their IT Management service model will be very attractive to those clients that have 200 users to 2000 users. These size businesses have the same sort of challenges that Motseng faced.   

IT Management today is about reducing costs, improving businesses productivity and increased governance. “It is no longer about the technology, it is more about applying technology in a way that supports the business goals” according to Terblanche, “The problem facing these mid- market companies is finding the cross over management skills to make this happen for them.”

The challenge facing executive management in making IT decisions is further clouded by the huge volume of hype from vendors and internal technologists holding onto preferred technology because of their own skill set or historic relationships.  Using an independent IT Management service like CXO Advisors supports the executive management requirement for the IT investment to be managed in a more business- like manner.