Specter is a premier technology consulting firm with the broad and in-depth knowledge necessary to build and manage customized technology solutions for your business. As your strategic partner in all things software, managed IT and beyond - we are equipped to handle your company’s entire tech stack.
Our “CTO for Hire” is a specialized consulting package for clients in need of a more integrated approach. The following will offer some basic facts on how a ‘CTO for Hire’ can help set your company up for success.
What is an Outsourced
CTO (CTO for Hire)?
The concept of the Outsourced CTO (OCTO) is to bring in someone with a Chief Technology Officer’s skillset without having to hire them as a fulltime employee. The average salary for a CTO is $318,000 + benefits + bonuses and can be too much for a lot of medium sized businesses.
The OCTO is someone who is brought on to oversee a project or technology department. In some instances, the existing technology team needs to prioritize other projects and the OCTO is a perfect fit to get the specialty project done, without having to hire a fulltime executive.
What is a CTO?
What does a CTO do?
What does a CIO do?
The CTO focuses on creating and using technology to promote a business’s growth, centralizing their efforts on external customers. The CIO focuses on overseeing a business’s internal strategic IT efforts to be sure they are running efficiently.
In most organizations, you have one person who chooses the title and does both internal and external systems. An insurance carrier with an API that allows customers to bind policies online likely only has a CIO that wears a CTO hat when working on the bind online project.
How does CTO
for hire work?
Generally, the consultant will focus on three things:
The most important part is aligning the vision of the company goals with technology. If the company doesn’t have a clear set of goals, the technology will not be able to be orchestrated and organized in a meaningful way. You will fall victim to trends or shiny objects.
For a specialty project, the OCTO will work with the internal technology teams to support their efforts while completing the project. In this case, unless otherwise asked, the OCTO will align with the company’s goals and objectives and focus on completing the special project as quickly and efficiently as possible.
This is all great, but
how much will it
cost me?
There are two basic models for the OCTO.
A combination of the two models is available as well.
Hiring an OCTO to help build out a brand-new app for payment processing. This OCTO will provide a team and the client to build a robust cost for building the system. The OCTO and their team will build and maintain the project for a fraction of the cost of hiring it in-house.
Hiring an OCTO to conduct an RFP process for a new core piece of system software. The OCTO has to work with all the departments to get an idea of what’s needed. This person then creates an RFP and helps the customer pick a good vendor. The company brings in an OCTO because their current technology department doesn’t have the bandwidth or expertise for the project.
Hiring an OCTO to run and manage the custom software for an online based company. The OCTO works to create the strategic technological vision for the company, while also hiring a team of software developers to build and maintain the product. The software developers are employees of the company, but the OCTO provides the higher-level oversight at a fraction of the cost.
Hiring an OCTO is a great way to leverage someone at the c-suite level at a fraction of the cost of bringing the person on fulltime.