CIO/CTOaaS | Fractional Technology Executive
You have technology decisions to make and nobody senior to make them with.
Most organisations hit this point before they can justify an executive salary. The decisions do not wait: a platform to choose, a build or buy call, a security questionnaire from your largest prospect, a developer who has become the only person who understands the system. Getting these wrong is expensive and slow to undo.
A CIO and a CTO answer different questions
The titles get used interchangeably. They are not the same job, and knowing which one you are short of tells you what to ask for. Most engagements are weighted to one side, and some need both.
Chief Information Officer
"Are we investing in the right things?"
- Technology strategy and the roadmap that follows from it
- Governance of the digital portfolio, and what gets funded next
- Vendor selection, contract negotiation and holding suppliers to account
- Policy, privacy and compliance obligations
- Investment cases your board will actually approve
Chief Technology Officer
"Are we building it the right way?"
- Architecture review: will this scale, and what breaks first
- Build versus buy, decided before you commit engineers to it
- Technical standards, delivery practice and code quality
- Secure by design, secure coding practice, and the evidence buyers ask for
- Your first engineering hires, and what not to build yet
Four ways to engage
All of them are underpinned by the Pragmatix Digital Transformation Framework (pX-DTF), our standards based approach to digital governance and delivery.
Retained hours
A set number of hours each month for ongoing advice, governance and executive support. Best where the need is continuous rather than a single decision.
Steering committee seat
We join your digital steering committee or IT governance board and provide independent oversight of technology investment.
Project based
One decision, scoped and answered: a vendor selection, an architecture review, a transformation plan, a second opinion on a proposal.
Founder advisory
For early stage businesses where we act as the technology function rather than advising one. No steering committee required, because there isn't one.
You have a working prototype. The next decisions are the expensive ones.
A prototype that works is not the same as a product a hospital, an insurer or a government department will buy. The gap between them is architecture, security and evidence, and it is usually the founder's first time crossing it.
Security is not a document you produce at the end. For a SaaS platform it is a set of architecture decisions made early, a coding discipline kept throughout, and evidence gathered before a buyer asks for it.
Founders usually meet this in the wrong order: a customer asks for a penetration test report and a SOC 2, and the honest answer requires changes to a platform that is already carrying real data. What a first engagement covers:
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1
Prototype to production architecture
What you have built, what it will do under real load and real data, and the smallest set of changes that gets it there. We look hard at the decisions you cannot cheaply undo later: your application stack, the cloud platform underneath it, and your data model. Written down, so your next engineer inherits a design rather than a guess.
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2
Secure by design, not secured afterwards
The decisions that determine whether a SaaS platform is secure are architectural: tenant isolation, where customer data is stored and processed, how secrets and keys are handled, and what an attacker reaches when one component falls over. Threat model it now and the answers are cheap. Retrofit them into a live platform and they are not.
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3
Secure coding practices, with AI in the loop
AI-assisted development produces plausible code quickly, which makes review discipline more important rather than less. Dependency and secrets management, static and dynamic analysis in the pipeline, and a code review standard your team will actually keep to once you are busy.
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4
The evidence your buyers will ask for
Enterprise, health and government buyers want proof rather than assurances. That means an independent penetration test, and increasingly SOC 2 or ISO 27001. We scope the test, brief the tester and turn the findings into a remediation plan. For certification we get you audit ready. The audit itself is signed by an external assessor, never by us.
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5
Privacy and regulatory runway
For health and other regulated data: the Privacy Act and the Australian Privacy Principles, including what they require once any part of your platform stores or processes data offshore. A privacy impact assessment where one is needed, and the interoperability standards your buyers assume you already meet.
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6
Building it, where that is what you need
Some founders have a team and need the architecture. Others have neither. We can take the build as well, using AI-assisted development with a senior architect accountable for what ships. The same person who wrote the architecture, which is rather the point.
Engagements start small and deliberately so. A single architecture review tells us both whether this is worth continuing.
Where we are usually called in
Growing businesses
Technology decisions have outgrown the office manager and the external IT provider, but not yet earned a full time executive.
Founders with a prototype
Something works, customers are interested, and the questions have turned into architecture, security and hiring.
Boards and executives
You need technology advice from someone with no product to sell you and no delivery contract to protect.
Between technology leaders
Your CIO or CTO has left. Decisions are queueing while you recruit, and the queue is the real cost.
Not for profit and government
Executive budget is limited, scrutiny is not. Independent advice that survives an audit.
Digital health
Clinical systems, health data and the standards that come with them. The sector we know best.
We have done the work, not only advised on it
We have been enterprise architects, solution architects, CTOs and program leads. We have sat on both sides of the table, as consultants advising organisations and as the executive accountable for delivery. We have led digital transformation programs worth over $300 million across healthcare, government, financial services and not for profit.
Our AI advisors in the Pragmatix Advisory Portal work to the same method, with a Pragmatix consultant reviewing what they produce. A retained engagement and the portal are often used together.
What people ask before the first call
How much does it cost?
Retained engagements are quoted on monthly hours, project work on scope. Founder advisory usually starts with a single architecture review so you can judge the value before committing to anything ongoing. We quote in writing before we start.
Do you write code?
Yes, when building is the right answer. It is a separate service and not every engagement needs it. We build integration, custom software and AI-powered platforms using AI-assisted development with a senior architect accountable for what ships. That is the same arrangement as our Advisory Portal, where the AI drafts and a Pragmatix consultant reviews the work. The rigour sits in the architecture and the review, not the typing. We also apply re-use before buy, buy before build, so expect us to talk you out of it when something off the shelf will do.
We already have developers. What would you add?
Developers build what they are asked to build. The gap is usually upstream: whether the architecture holds, whether you are buying something you should build, whether a customer's security review will pass. That is the work.
We are pre revenue. Is this premature?
Sometimes, and we will tell you if it is. The decisions worth paying for early are the ones that are expensive to reverse: your application stack, the cloud platform you build on, your data model, where customer data is stored and where it is processed, and anything that touches regulated information. Change any of those once you have customers and it is a migration, not an edit. Most other things can wait.
Book a free 30 minute call to talk through where you are and what you actually need. No obligation, and we will tell you if you do not need us yet.