Practices

Five practices, one way of working.

Every engagement is led by a practitioner who has built, bought, run, or retired the technology in question. No vendor kickbacks, no offshore handoffs, no slide-deck theater. The same person who briefs your board will be the person on the implementation calls.

01
Flagship practice

Technology Strategy & Advisory

We help leadership teams answer the technology questions that don't have an obvious owner. Where to invest next, what to retire, which vendor to trust, how to translate any of it into language the board can act on.

What we do

  • Technology strategy & multi-year roadmaps
  • Fractional CIO and CTO leadership
  • Vendor strategy, RFPs, and contract negotiation
  • Technology due diligence (M&A, PE, pre-investment)
  • Operating-model design and tech org structure
  • Board and executive briefings

How we work

Project-based

Six- to twelve-week strategy or roadmap engagements with a defined deliverable, named outcomes, and a fixed price.

Fractional retainer

Ongoing CIO or CTO presence on a multi-month commitment. Detailed below.

Tech due diligence

Two- to four-week reviews scoped to the deal. Capital-grade output, plain-English summary.

Sub-product · Fractional CIO/CTO

Senior technology leadership, on the cadence your business actually needs.

For organizations that need real CIO or CTO judgment in the room, but don't have the scale, the budget, or the candidate pool to hire one full-time. Sized for $5M–$200M revenue companies and the associations and PE-backed mid-market businesses that look like them.

Commitment
3-month minimum
Cadence
Biweekly leadership session
Advisory hours
10+ per month
Board visibility
Quarterly briefing
  • Standing seat in technology decisions and architecture reviews
  • Vendor escalation, contract review, and SI accountability
  • Hiring support for senior tech roles you do bring in-house
  • Roadmap maintenance, the plan stays current as the business shifts
  • Board and executive briefings authored and delivered with the CEO
  • Direct line for any tech question between sessions, no clock-watching
Set our technology strategy, or run an assessment first
02

Enterprise Systems Modernization

The core systems your business actually runs on, built, replaced, or extended without breaking what works. The buyer-side perspective from someone who has implemented these systems, not just specified them.

What we do

  • ERP, CRM, AMS, WMS, OMS implementation oversight
  • System selection and vendor evaluation
  • Multi-entity consolidation
  • Legacy system retirement and data migration
  • Integration architecture (EDI, APIs, middleware)
  • Field service and operations technology

How we work

System selection

Eight- to twelve-week engagements covering requirements, vendor evaluation, demo orchestration, and a defensible recommendation with TCO.

Implementation oversight

Buyer-side governance for SI-led implementations. We hold your vendor accountable to scope, timeline, and quality.

Modernization roadmap

For organizations not yet ready to commit to a replacement, sequenced plans that buy time and reduce risk.

Plan a modernization, ERP, CRM, AMS, WMS, OMS, or the data layer they share
03

Data & Analytics Platforms

The data foundation everything else depends on, sized to your scale, not to the vendor's pricing model. We strip the stack down to what your business actually uses, and rebuild trust in the numbers leadership relies on.

What we do

  • Data warehouse and lakehouse architecture
  • Analytics engineering (dbt, real-time pipelines)
  • BI and dashboards (Power BI, Fabric, Tableau)
  • Data governance, quality, and observability
  • Marketing analytics and attribution modeling
  • Data maturity assessment and roadmaps

How we work

Maturity assessment

Three- to four-week diagnostic against the ARYS data maturity framework, with a sequenced roadmap and price-anchored recommendations.

Platform build

End-to-end design and delivery of warehouse, pipelines, and analytics layer. We bring in delivery partners only where it makes you money.

Embedded data leadership

Available as part of a fractional CIO/CTO retainer for organizations without a dedicated head of data.

Build our data platform, or run a data maturity assessment first
04

AI & Intelligent Automation

Where AI is genuinely useful, where it isn't, and what data foundations have to be in place before either question is worth asking. We separate the substance from the hype, and we have working AI systems in production to prove the difference.

What we do

  • AI readiness assessment and roadmap
  • LLM and agent deployment (member service, content, ops)
  • Applied ML (forecasting, recommendations, classification)
  • AI governance and risk frameworks
  • Operational automation (intake, document processing, routing)
  • Vendor evaluation for AI products and platforms

How we work

AI readiness assessment

Four-week diagnostic naming the three to five highest-value AI use cases for your organization, the data foundation each requires, and the order to build them in.

Deployment partnership

Pilot to production for the use cases that pass the readiness filter. Built on platforms you can maintain after we leave.

AI governance

Policies, risk frameworks, and board-ready language for organizations whose stakeholders are asking harder questions than the leadership team can yet answer.

Build our AI roadmap, start with readiness, not a pilot
05

Program Leadership & Transformation

Multi-vendor, multi-year programs run with the discipline of someone who has actually delivered them. When a transformation is bigger than your team has done before, or stalling and needs to be rescued, we step into the seat, not the slide deck.

What we do

  • Program and portfolio leadership
  • Multi-vendor governance and accountability
  • Change management and staff enablement
  • Stalled-program rescue and re-baselining
  • Post-merger IT integration
  • PMO design and operating cadence

How we work

Program leadership

Embedded leadership of a single named program, typically a multi-vendor implementation, a $5M+ initiative, or a transformation that has already started.

Program rescue

Two- to four-week intervention on a stalling program: diagnose the root cause, restore governance, and re-baseline with the team that's already in place.

Portfolio oversight

For organizations with multiple programs in flight, a portfolio-level governance layer that surfaces risk before it becomes a board conversation.

Lead a program, including stalled ones already in flight

Don't know which practice you need? Start with an assessment.

The Stack Assessment is the front door to all five practices. A 21-day, fixed-price diagnostic that tells you where the money is going, what's actually broken, and which of the five practices, or which combination of them, should come next.

See the assessment in detail →
21
Days end-to-end
3
Deliverables: summary, findings, prioritized action plan
5
Practices the output can route into
How clients buy

Four ways to work with us.

01

Project-based

Defined scope, fixed timeline, named deliverables. Strategy work, assessments, system selections, and bounded implementations.

Typical: 4–16 weeks
02

Fractional retainer

Ongoing CIO or CTO leadership at a sub-full-time commitment. Standing cadence, advisory hours, board visibility.

Typical: 3 months minimum
03

Tech due diligence

Capital-grade reviews scoped to the deal. Technology, data, and team assessment for M&A and PE investment.

Typical: 2–4 weeks
04

Workshop & training

Standalone enablement: board briefings, leadership team workshops, and staff training on data and AI capability.

Typical: 1–3 days

Bring us the question you can't outsource an answer to.

Every practice on this page exists because real clients had a real problem that needed a practitioner's judgment. Tell us yours. The first conversation is free, candid, and short.