Technology Operator
A full-time CTO is too much company. Promoting your IT manager is too little.
What the business actually needs is judgement, in the room, at the handful of moments that decide the money: a board meeting, a vendor negotiation, a diligence, an integration. That is a few days a month, and it is the hardest few days a month to hire.
What companies this size actually do
Four options, all of them reasonable at the time, and none of them producing what the board needs.
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They promote the person running the estate
Who is good at running the estate, and who now cannot tell you their own function is under-resourced without appearing to argue for themselves.
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They give it to the CFO
Who can own the budget but not the judgement, generally knows it, and has a full job already.
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They hire full-time and over-hire
A serious CTO at this size has a handful of days a month of real decisions and a great deal of invented work, and is gone inside two years.
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Or nobody owns it at all
Technology then reaches the board as a cost line and a set of problems, and never once as a plan.
Why not just hire one?
Sometimes you should, and we will tell you when. These are the four reasons it usually does not work at this size.
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The decisions are lumpy and the salary is not
There are weeks where this role matters enormously and months where it does not. A salary does not flex to that shape and neither does a person sitting in it.
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A good one will not stay
The person you actually want has run something larger. Here they are under-used, and they leave for somewhere they are not.
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One career is one estate
Most of the value in this role is pattern. Somebody who has taken the decision at fifteen companies knows what the vendor is about to say next.
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You cannot assess the hire
The same problem as every other technology hire, arriving at the level where getting it wrong is most expensive and takes longest to show.
What we take on
Two jobs, and most people who sell this only do the first one.
In the boardroom
- The technology line in the value creation plan
- Board and operating review attendance
- Buy, build or defer, argued with reasons
- Vendor selection, and the negotiation
- Diligence support on bolt-ons
- Exit readiness, on the technology side
In the company
- Mentoring or line management of the in-house lead
- Architecture and roadmap decisions
- The budget, and what to stop spending
- Security posture, and what it should cost
- Recruitment of the team, where there is one
- The escalation point when something goes wrong
What changes
Seniority applied where it changes an outcome, rather than seniority retained in case it is needed.
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Judgement in the room, at the moment it matters
In the meeting where the decision is actually taken, rather than in a paper circulated a fortnight afterwards.
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Pattern rather than one career
Somebody who has watched this decision play out at other companies, including the times it went badly.
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It flexes with the deal
More through diligence and integration, less in a quiet quarter, and none of that requiring a difficult conversation.
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Your IT lead gains a manager, not a rival
Somebody senior to escalate to and learn from, rather than a title being handed to an outsider they now have to work around.
When to bring this in
Judgement is worth most before money moves, and every one of these is a point where it is about to.
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Before the first large commitment
The ERP decision, the cloud migration, the security spend. Advice after the contract is commentary.
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Before the first bolt-on
Integration is where technology cost appears, and it appears after the price has been agreed.
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Before you promote somebody into it
A title is very hard to take back, and the wrong one usually costs you the person as well as the role.
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Before exit planning begins
The technology questions in diligence get answered months earlier or they do not get answered well.
The rest of what we run
Where to start
A two week audit. One document. No obligation.
Fixed scope, fixed price. It reads your systems and tells you what is wrong, what each fix costs, and what to do first. You keep the report either way.
What it turns up
- Licences paid for and not used
- Firewall rules nobody has reviewed since install
- Administrator accounts with no owner
- Reports built on a source that stopped updating
- An integration failing quietly, nobody alerted
What it reads live
- Licences, systems and what they cost waiting
- Network, remote access and segmentation waiting
- Cloud tenant, identity and admin rights waiting
- Core systems and how they connect waiting
- Reporting, data quality and access waiting
One document: what is wrong, what it costs to fix, and what to fix first.