Fractional CIO

A fractional CIO: technology decided for the business.

Strategy, budgets, vendors, security and the roadmap, owned by someone senior. The day-to-day IT can be run by our managed IT team at opsworq.net, or by yours.

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A whiteboard with a hand-drawn diagram of boxes and lines, an orange marker capped in the tray.

When it fits

When a fractional CIO makes sense.

Technology spending keeps growing and nobody can say what it buys.
You can’t tell whether your IT provider is good.
An insurer, a client or an auditor has sent a security questionnaire nobody can answer.
A big system is due for replacement: accounting, CRM, phones, the line-of-business software.
A sale or a raise is coming, and the buyer will run IT due diligence.

What the role owns

What the role actually owns.

A technology roadmap tied to the business plan, in plain business terms.
The budget, the renewals and the subscriptions nobody uses.
Choosing vendors and holding them to what they promised, including your IT provider.
Security policies, insurance questionnaires and client security reviews.
System selection and the projects that replace or connect systems, through the test gate.
A monthly report to the owner: what changed, what it cost, what’s next.

Your IT team

Not the help desk.

A fractional CIO sets direction; someone else answers the tickets. If our managed IT team at opsworq.net runs your IT, the CIO holds them to the same published standards as any provider, and you see the same reports. If someone else runs it, we work with them, and if they’re good, we’ll say so.

Rates

One published rate, reserved by the month.

$300 an hour. Retainers: Advisory 8 hours ($2,400), Part-time 16 hours ($4,800), Embedded 32 hours ($9,600), Interim quoted weekly. 90-day first term, then month to month. Help hiring a permanent CIO or IT manager included.

All the terms

The calculator, set to technology, with the national median wage for computer and information systems managers pre-filled ($175,140, BLS, May 2025).

Senior hours you need a month

The role

OperationsTechnologyBoth

The salary you’d pay, $Pre-filled with the national median wage for computer and information systems managers, May 2025 (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics). Use your own figure if you have one.

Benefits and overhead, %Benefits, payroll taxes, recruiting and space. Your own figure; at 0 the comparison is salary alone.

A year, side by side

Fractional, at $300 an hour

$57,600

A hire

$175,140

Fractional stops being cheaper at about 11 hours a week.

When the hours you need would cost more than a hire, hire one. For most businesses that point falls between one and two days a week, depending on the salary the role would command. We’ll help you do it.

Your numbers. An estimate, not a quote.

Questions

Questions people ask.

Is this the “virtual CIO” our IT provider offers?

No. Many IT providers include a virtual CIO in a support contract. This is a senior role you hire by the hour, independent of who runs your IT.

Will you push us to switch IT providers?

No. If your provider is good, we’ll say so. If it isn’t, you’ll see why in writing before anything changes.

Who would our CIO be?

Usually Mark, whose work is infrastructure, security and technology architecture.