CostusWorx Fractional CTO · IT advisory

CostusWorx  /  Service · Retainer

Fractional CTO services for South African businesses

Senior IT leadership on a monthly retainer: strategy, oversight, vendor management, governance and execution, without the fixed cost of a full-time executive. You get the decisions made, and someone accountable for them.

Scopedmonthly retainer
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Fit

You probably need this if

  • Technology decisions keep landing on someone whose actual job is something else
  • You're being quoted for systems and have no independent way to judge the quotes
  • Nobody owns the IT estate end to end, so nothing gets sequenced. It just gets bought
  • The board asks what IT costs and the honest answer takes a week to assemble
  • You have outgrown ad-hoc support but can't justify a full-time CTO salary

Scope

What the retainer covers

Technology strategy and roadmap

A written view of what to do, in what order, and what each step costs: reviewed and re-sequenced as the business changes, not filed and forgotten.

Vendor governance

We sit on your side of the table for selection, negotiation and delivery. We take no licence margin from any vendor, so the recommendation is the whole business case.

Architecture and delivery oversight

Decisions get made and recorded. Delivery gets held to the plan, with the trade-offs stated plainly when the plan has to move.

Board-level reporting

Technology on the agenda in language the board can act on: risk, spend, progress, and what happens if nothing changes.

Escalation and continuity

A named person who already knows your estate when something breaks, rather than a ticket queue that starts from zero.

Process

How it runs

Every engagement starts the same way, whichever service you need.

01

A conversation

You tell us what's going on. We ask what you're running, what it costs and where it hurts, and we tell you plainly whether we can help. No sales deck.

02

Findings & proposal

A written view of priorities, sequencing and cost, with the trade-offs stated plainly. You'll know what we'd do first and why.

03

Execution & oversight

We stay accountable for delivery: vendor governance, architecture decisions and the board-level reporting that keeps technology on the agenda.

Independence

We're nobody's reseller

We take no licence margin on SAP, Oracle, JD Edwards, Sage or any CRM. There's no partner relationship to protect and no rebate behind the recommendation, so when we tell you which option to take, the recommendation is the whole business case. We have also made the expensive mistakes already (vendor lock-in, an integration that looked fine in the demo, a migration that ran long) on our own balance sheet rather than yours.

8
Eight platforms in production. We designed, built, deployed and still operate every one of them, across two regulatory jurisdictions. That's why we can tell you what a system really costs to run. We pay those bills ourselves.
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Related

Other ways we help

Let's start the conversation

Tell us what's going on and we'll come back to you within one business day.

Start the conversation → +27 82 650 9098