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What is CIOAdvisor about? What
does it really do? |
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CIOAdvisorTM is an IT
management solution designed to organize the work of IT
departments to make them more efficient and help them
implement industry best practices. The software facilitates
most of the activities of the department and consolidates
information related to such activities through one common
easily accessible web service. These activities include
tracking of IT assets, IT projects, activities of IT staff,
managing problems to ensure they are resolved quickly,
managing system enhancements and their implementation,
providing time-reporting facilities for all staff,
maintaining patch and audit data on critical host systems,
maintaining license information and warning about upcoming
expirations, maintaining details about suppliers, and
providing summary and detailed information about all of the
above. |
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Can you explain all the benefits
to us if we deploy this product? |
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This product reduces the start-up
costs and total cost of ownership, with only one system to
acquire, install, train staff on and maintain. With an
integrated database, it allows for a comprehensive and
real-time understanding of IT operations, facilitating
optimal allocation of limited IT resources. With a central
repository, the system enforces industry-best practices and
strengthens audit functions improving accountability
throughout the organization. With the automated, built-in
Business Continuity Planning (BCP) module, this system will
help your organization prepare for disasters and serious
incidents. Such preparation can also reduce your company’s
insurance premiums as it will help in quicker recovery of
business operation in the event of a serious incident such
as fires and natural disasters. |
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Is there work-flow process
automation with this system? |
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The work-flow process is one of the
strongest features of this system. For example, if a user
enters a system enhancement request, CIOAdvisorTM
will automatically look up the person who has overall
responsibility for the system being changed and sends an
email to that person for approval. If other systems are also
dependent on the system being changed, CIOAdvisorTM
will automatically determine such dependency and highlight
those systems affected. Because these other systems can be
impacted by the change, managers responsible for these
systems will also be notified by the CIOAdvisorTM
when this request is submitted. The authorizing managers
have the option of approving the request after reviewing it,
rejecting the request as unnecessary, too risky or they can
opt to review the request later. After the request is
approved, CIOAdvisorTM then changes the status of
the request so that it can now be assigned to an IT
personnel to work on. When this change is eventually
scheduled for implementation, the managers of the user
departments are also notified of the upcoming change. Once
the change is implemented, the same managers are notified so
that they can advise their employees of what has taken
place. This is to ensure that every employee potentially
affected by a change is aware of such change. Additionally,
notices of changes that are about to be implemented and
those changes that have just been installed are
automatically posted on the Change Management module of
CIOAdvisorTM. Users, at any time, can check the
status of their requested changes. Similar process
automation is also a feature of many modules of the product.
This work-flow process automation saves the company much
valued time. |
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How can you say it will help us
save cost? By how much? |
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Traditionally, various aspects of
the IT department’s work are the responsibility of specific
individuals. For example, tracking the status of IT assets
are assigned to System Administrators who in turn use tools
like spreadsheets to maintain such data. In companies where
there are thousands of assets to track, the use of
spreadsheets becomes an unacceptable solution and therefore
they acquire an IT management solution. For the CIO to get
summary information for all the assets, or by location or
business units, he would normally approach the IT manager
responsible for infrastructure management who then in turn
approaches the System Administrator responsible for such
activity and requests the data the CIO needs. The System
Administrator then goes through the data (in some cases, he
obtains the data from another department that maintains such
data through a system such as the Fixed Asset system for the
information) and puts together a report that the CIO needs.
In many cases, the report is reformatted to satisfy the CIO
or the data changed to fit the needs. By the time the report
is ready for presentation, a lot of time has already been
spent by the CIO, the IT manager and the System
Administrator. With CIOAdvisorTM, all it takes is
one click of a mouse at any time. By doing that, the CIO
instantly receives information that is from live data and,
therefore, most current. This scenario can be repeated many
times when information about problems, system enhancements,
projects, vendors, licenses, audits and others are required.
Imagine the time that is saved on a daily basis just for
this reason alone. Another scenario is for companies that
operate branch operation at many locations. In a typical
situation where there is no centralized way of tracking
system problems and incidents, a problem encountered and
reported by a user at the company’s San Francisco office,
for example, which took a couple of days to be investigated
and to resolve, can also be experienced by users in the
company’s London, England office. Without a centralized
system, the London office will potential spend a similar
amount of time doing investigation and analysis work before
resolving the problem. With CIOAdvisorTM, all it
takes is for the IT personnel to enter a keyword to search
the company’s problem database and determine if the problem
has occurred somewhere else. By reviewing the activities
undertaken by the San Francisco IT staff, for example, the
London office staff would now be aware of the nature of the
problem and the steps needed to fix it thereby saving the
company valuable time that staff can spend on other more
productive cases. Gartner, in one of its reports, has
suggested that companies that organize themselves in terms
of IT operations, can save as much as 20-30% of its overall
IT budget. For companies that are spending millions if not
billions of dollars annually, this can be a substantial
savings. |
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What size of companies can be
supported by this system? |
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This system can support and provide
benefits to the smallest companies with only one System
Administrator to the largest multinational corporations that
have operations worldwide. The larger the organization, the
more significant the benefits and cost savings are from
CIOAdvisorTM. |
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What will be the limitations to
the operation of this system? |
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CIOAdvisorTM can be
implemented without any source code changes from the
smallest companies to the largest multinational
corporations. Companies are only limited by the power and
speed of their server hosting this system, their
communications bandwidth connecting the system to the
network and the size of the server’s hard drive. If they use
Microsoft SQL Server 2000, their user connection license can
be a limiting factor. |
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How much does it cost? |
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To get the equivalent
functionality, benefits and features of CIOAdvisorTM,
a company would need to acquire many different IT management
solutions that are currently available at a much higher
total cost. Even with all these solutions acquired,
installed and combined, you still will not automatically get
the total information consolidation and integrated summary
that our software provides. Since pricing is dependent on
the number of seats and special client requirements, you
will need to contact one of our resellers to get a more
exact pricing information. If you do not have a reseller in
your area, please contact us directly and we will provide
you with the information you need. |
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What are the other costs
associated with this product? |
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Time spent by consultants or system
administrators in installing and configuring the product,
the server (hardware) and the Operating System licenses are
the additional cost of implementing this system. |
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What is the technical
environment that this system will run in? |
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This system is designed to operate
on a server running on Microsoft’s Windows server Operating
System such as Microsoft 2000 Server and Microsoft Windows
2003 Server. However, the system will also operate on
servers with Microsoft Windows XP Professional and Microsoft
Windows 2000 Professional. The preferred operational
environment would be a server running on the Microsoft
operating system designed to operate servers. The system
must also be connected to the Internet. |
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What do we need to install this
system? |
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In addition to the server hardware
and the Microsoft Windows server Operating Systems, you must
ensure that your Internet Information Service (IIS) is
enabled and that the Microsoft .NET Version 1.1 platform is
installed and configured according to our installation
instructions. |
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What technical platform was it
developed in? |
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We developed this system using the
Microsoft .NET technology, Microsoft SQL Server 2000
development environment, Microsoft ASP.NET and C#. |
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What database management system
does this product use? |
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Microsoft SQL Server 2000. |
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Will we need to install
Microsoft SQL Server 2000 to use this product? |
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We are incorporating all the
database functionalities using the distributable Microsoft
MSDE components so users will not need to install the
Microsoft SQL Server 2000 DBMS. However, Microsoft MSDE does
not include facilities like Microsoft’s Enterprise Manager,
so for organizations who want to manipulate the data
contained in our database, they would have to either install
the Microsoft SQL Server 2000 and the appropriate version of
CIOAdvisorTM or get third-party software that
will provide similar functionality as the Microsoft
Enterprise Manager. |
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Can we customize this product? |
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You can customize this product to a
great degree. For example, by including your company logo
during the initial configuration, your company name and logo
will be displayed on all pages. Furthermore, we have
provided you the ability to change some of the labels or
field names. That is how we can implement a localized
version with Spanish, Italian, French and other languages
for the field names and menu labels. You can also change the
values of many of the drop-down selectable options. For
example, the predefined values for the status of assets such
as “Ordered”, “Received”, “Assigned”, etc. can be changed to
meet your needs. |
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How do we deploy this system –
is it for use only by the IT department or can the end user
use it as well? |
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Many companies can elect to allow
end users within the company, regardless of their
geographical location, to report problems directly to
minimize the load on Help Desk staff as well as request
system enhancements through this system. Some companies,
however, would rather have their IT staff enter the reported
data themselves. It all depends on the company’s preference.
You can also provide access to this system to your company
president so that they can assess the status of your IT
department directly without the need to consult your IT
head. However, your IT head may elect to be in control if it
is determined that your company president does not require
any direct access to this system. |
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Can we give our clients access
to this system so they can request for product enhancements
or report a problems with our services or products directly?
Can we integrate your software as a feature of our website
to allow such client access? |
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It would be up to your company to
deploy this product according to your requirements. For
example, a client can this product so that their
installation of their own products at client sites will be
defined as projects through this system and their project
engineers will be able to enter their task activities
remotely from the client sites as well as their billable
hours. Their clients will be given Read-Only access to the
project module to verify the status of the installation as
well as confirm the billable hours entered by the engineers.
At the same time, the Head Office accountants will be able
to compile the billable hours that are immediately available
to produce invoices. Furthermore, their clients will be
given access to the Problem and Incident Reporting module to
report problems encountered with the installed system as
well as the ability to request system enhancement requests.
Yes, you can integrate this system as part of your Intranet
or even your website. This can be accomplished by
establishing a link from your site to this service. |
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Can we provide group-type
access, i.e., can we tailor the access rights and privileges
for groups of people? |
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You can control what a user or a
group of users can do with this system. You can allow
specific group of users access to specific modules, e.g.,
Problem and Change Request modules, and whether they can
enter data or just read the reports. This feature is very
easy to implement and is really very useful in grouping many
different users according to their access needs. |
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Is there an audit trail for the
data that is being maintained? |
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Every time a user logs in and
creates a record or makes changes to a record, CIOAdvisorTM
will record such activity in its audit trail log. This log
becomes part of the record and can be reviewed at any time. |
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Can we access this system
outside of our work environment, i.e., from our homes? |
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This system, being a web service,
can be accessed by anybody from anywhere so long as they
have an Internet browser and can connect to it via Internet
access. However, the user must have the right access code
(User ID and password) as well as secure connection dictated
by your VPN controls and firewall rules to be able to use
the system. The president of your company can even review
the overall status and operation of your IT department while
in bed or sitting in the toilet with his laptop connected
wirelessly to this system via the Internet. It just show you
the power of this system being web accessible. |
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How secure is this system? |
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This system controls user access
via a User ID, password and group access definitions. It
also has a built-in log to track user access and changes.
However, this system is only as secure as the quality and
strength of your organization’s security controls. A system
administrator who has unlimited access to the server and can
access the CIOAdvisorTM data via the back door,
i.e., using utility programs that are available for database
manipulation. |
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I already have a fixed asset
system, or a change management system or a help desk system,
how can we benefit from your system without duplicating data
that has already been entered? |
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If your Fixed Asset System can
export data to a file in a specific format, you can develop
scripts or programs that can read such data and
automatically create the appropriate records in the
CIOAdvisorTM’s Asset database. Basilica Software
Corporation has developed such scripts for populating the
User and Asset database tables. You can make this process
automated in such a way that, if your Human Resources or
Fixed Asset system or Change Management System, the script
will automatically monitor the data being created and
automatically insert the appropriate records in the
CIOAdvisorTM database. An alternative is to
create an overnight process that would do the same. The
ideal situation is to use the CIOAdvisorTM as
your main system for collecting information about every
aspect of your IT operation. You will not only make this
process more centralized and organized, you also will not
need to spend additional licensing fees for these other
systems. |
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We currently use a popular Human
Resource Management system. How can we make sure that your
user database contains up-to-date user information? |
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As per the above, you can create a
script or program that can serve as an interface to
integrate CIOAdvisorTM with your existing
environment. PeopleSoft, for example, has features that can
automatically export the user data needed by CIOAdvisorTM
every time such data is created or changed. This data can be
automatically imported by CIOAdvisorTM through
the above-mentioned scripts. This way, you will always have
up-to-the-minute user information in your CIOAdvisorTM
database. |
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What’s with this "implementing
best practices" using your solution? |
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IT Departments are given the
important role of being the company custodian of business
and operational data. To be a professional establishment,
the IT department is expected to implement certain practices
to ensure proper development and operation of its systems,
their availability and to manage costs. Such practices
include keeping track of all the assets acquired and their
costs, properly managing projects and containing their
costs, keeping track of system problems and ensure that they
are resolved quickly, properly managing system changes,
managing IT staff workload, managing vendors and suppliers
as well as all the licenses and so on, while at the same
time ensuring that all the associated information is
recorded providing documentation for historical and audit
purposes. By implementing CIOAdvisorTM within
your organization, you now have the opportunity to implement
best practices and enforce the necessary discipline that is
needed for your IT operation. Especially now with demands
for Business Continuity Planning and compliance with such
legislations as the Serbanes Oaxley (SOX) law, your life
will be made a lot easier by CIOAdvisorTM. |
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Does this system require a
full-time system administrator? |
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Just like any other system, you
need to ensure that the system is installed and operating
properly. A System Administrator is required to carry out
that role as well as ensure that daily backups are taken,
problems observed with this system are reported to Basilica
Software Corporation and performance and disk utilization
are monitored. Furthermore, someone within the organization
must be given the responsibility to define users, ensure
that they, the developers, system and network
administrators, IT managers and everyone else who have
access to this system are properly using it. Companies can
only benefit from the use of CIOAdvisorTM if it
is used properly. So discipline must be enforced and
ensuring such is the case should be assigned to someone
within your organization. |
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How will this system help
improve our department’s auditability? |
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By having all your issues, costs,
accomplishments and activities recorded centrally, you now
have the ability to review the history of all aspects of
your IT operation as well as obtain cost related factors. A
financial auditor can easily verify IT budgets as expenses
are reflected by the assets recorded in the system as well
as work such as system development projects undertaken by
the IT staff. |
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What kind of support do we get? |
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We have made arrangements with our
resellers to provide front-end or Tier-1 support to clients.
Inquiries related to installation, configuration and
operation and even general questions regarding the product
will be handled by your supplier. This is important as they
are the ones who know you best and are closest to you to be
able to respond as quick as possible. However, any technical
or other inquiries that cannot be handled by your software
vendor will be happily handled by Basilica Software
Corporation as long as you have the proper maintenance
agreement. |
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How much will the maintenance
fee be and what does it cover? |
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Your initial license fee covers the
first year maintenance agreement. This covers providing
technical support as well as entitles you to product
enhancements and bug fixes, if any. Annual maintenance
subscription is 20% of the license purchase price agreed to
with your supplier. Additional features such as new modules
are not covered by this maintenance agreement but must be
purchased separately. |
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How well do you respond to
product enhancement suggestions? |
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Many of the current features of
CIOAdvisorTM were suggestions from various who
have already reviewed this product previously. Basilica is
more than willing to accommodate suggestions for improvement
of this product especially those features that will benefit
all its clients. |
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How about upgrades and bug
patches – are they easy to implement? |
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Upgrades and patches can be easily
implemented either via re-installation of the software or by
executing script files. |
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Can we request for product
customization? |
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We can customize the product to
your preference as part of our consulting service. |
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What are your future plans for
this product? |
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We will continually enhance this
product to benefit and meet the requirements of our clients
by adding more functionality, improving existing features
and refining the interface as needed. |
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Will you release this solution
with languages other than English? |
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We are a global company and intend
to establish our client base worldwide. For this reason, we
are exploring modification to other languages. |
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We are a small company and would
like to take advantage of your product. However, our System
Administrator is already extremely busy as is and we do not
want to hire another person to manage this system. Do you
have a service that we can subscribe to so we can manage our
IT department using your product without actually hosting
and administering your system at our site? |
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Part of our offering that is
already available is a subscription service where clients do
not have to install, configure and maintain CIOAdvisorTM
and the server it is running on. For a reasonable set up and
monthly usage fee, clients can take advantage of the
product’s features without having to operate and maintain a
server, renew software licenses and hire a System
Administrator. |
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Do you have a hardware version
of CIOAdvisorTM? |
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CIOAdvisorTM is also
available as a hardware appliance. It is called the "CIOAdvisorTM
-in-a-Box". The product comes with the Microsoft Windows
Server Operating System, Microsoft .NET platform, Internet
Information Service (IIS) and CIOAdvisorTM
already installed, enabled and pre-configured and
unnecessary services disabled. |
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If this system is that good, how
come we’ve never heard of it before? Who are your current
users? |
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The product was just recently
developed and is now just being made available to clients.
If you require information about our current users, you must
contact Basilica Software Corporation directly to arrange
for such information. |
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We are a software vendor, can we
become a distributor of your product? What are the
requirements? |
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Basilica Software Corporation
offers software vendors opportunity to share in the success
of this product. We offer partnership with resellers through
our Reseller Program. Software vendors can earn great
potential revenues possible by licensing CIOAdvisorTM
to their clients, providing installation and implementation
support and offering subscription services. However,
Resellers will require training before being authorized to
market our software. |
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It seems that this really is the
best solution there is, bar none. Can I refer it to
companies? Can I be compensated for introducing you to a
client that results in a sale? |
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Basilica Software Corporation also
offers an Independent Referral Program to individuals who
can refer us directly to purchasers. If such referral
results in a sale, commission is paid. However, there are
specific conditions that must be met. For additional
information, please contact Basilica Software Corporation. |
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I am a CIO. It looks like this
product is exactly what I need. Can you tell me who the
closest reseller that I can contact to get an evaluation
copy of this product? |
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We will publish a list of resellers
who are authorized to market, distribute and support
CIOAdvisorTM. However, if none is available in
your area, please contact us directly and we will more than
happy to demonstrate the product's capabilities to your
organization. |
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Will we still need our CIO after
we’ve installed this product? |
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Yes. Your CIO is a valuable member
of your organization's management team. CIOAdvisorTM
was developed to support him in his role, not to eliminate
his position. |
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How stable is Basilica Software
Corporation? |
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Basilica Software Corporation
consists of a very strong management team with solid
experience in the IT industry. The company was formed
specifically to address the needs of IT management based on
the experience and knowledge of its principals. |
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This
page provides answers to most frequently asked questions by our
clients. If you have any other questions that are not found here,
you can also send an email to