An interim CTO for your company:

An external CTO can audit your information system, see where time is being lost, improve processes, identify security issues, documentation gaps, or training gaps related to tools and how they communicate with each other. They can also prepare a roadmap for your growth and hiring, especially from the technical side, and work on the architecture of your company and your solutions if you have custom-built solutions you want to redesign or evolve. They can also manage providers. If you work with freelance developers, for example, they can act as a form of project management. They can also identify cybersecurity risks in your company by reviewing best practices, what can be put in place, secure access systems, multifactor authentication, physical authentication keys, and the cybersecurity of your solutions, whether custom or not. These can be audited if needed. An external CTO can also manage your IT budget by focusing it on the biggest priorities identified during audits, as well as choosing between the different software and solutions that can meet your needs, studying technical debt, or examining opportunities related to artificial intelligence for your activity, your processes, and your information system, in order to automate what can be automated and reduce manual tasks that bring little value, with the goal of making you more productive.

An external CTO works with many companies of different sizes, but mainly SMEs and startups, because they are not yet large enough to justify a full-time CTO. They are also more often involved during major change periods, whether that is an acquisition, takeover, sale, fundraising, or simply a period of hypergrowth that requires a more documented and structured framework. Company size is therefore not the only factor to consider: it is above all the volume of technical needs, their complexity, and the period the company is going through that determine whether an external CTO engagement is relevant.

An external CTO will on average be about three times less present in terms of the number of hours worked for you than a hired CTO and can cost up to twice as much at equal working time. It is therefore natural that hiring a CTO becomes the most logical solution at a certain stage. Of course, it depends on the company’s maturity and the amount of work needed, so that an external CTO is not assigned missions that bring little value, which is then not necessarily cost-effective for the company. By contrast, an external CTO working during urgent periods or in companies needing very specific skills can be extremely valuable, especially when they come from a digital services agency, because that agency can provide multiple points of contact and multiple experts, which fits these situations well.

An external CTO can be present during transition missions lasting a few months or even longer-term support over several years, while an interim CTO may intervene as part of a temporary replacement lasting a few weeks. The length of an interim or external CTO mission is therefore highly variable and adapts above all to your need. There is no real minimum or maximum.

The first month with an external CTO usually begins with interviews and discussions with leadership, team leads, and the different business experts so they can understand the company as a whole, as well as its operations and processes. This is usually followed by an initial audit of the different solutions and the information system, so that documentation can be produced if it does not already exist, the information system can be mapped, costs and risks can be analyzed, and a prioritization can be established based on what the CTO identifies through this audit. The goal is then to produce a roadmap of the actions to take over 30-day, 60-day, and 90-day periods, and to identify where the biggest sources of value are, whether that is time savings, financial gains, or quality improvements for your production and your clients.

The first deliverables an external CTO provides are usually a full mapping of the information system and a technology roadmap, meaning a hiring roadmap as well as IT issues related to custom solutions, the information system, and the company’s digital products, so the team has full visibility on everything the CTO has identified. No real dependency then forms around their knowledge. The external CTO and interim CTO offering also makes it possible to have documents such as risk registers, architecture documents, as well as security policies and reports, in order to structure operations and bring expertise to very important topics for the company that can sometimes be overlooked.

Yes, absolutely. An external CTO is fully capable of managing a technical team, whether it is internal or made up of providers, freelancers, or an agency. This even allows the company, when providers are themselves agencies, to have an even more objective view of the prices proposed, the deadlines announced, and the technical choices made by those teams and providers, in order to keep full control over budgets as well as developments so they fit perfectly into the information system. An external CTO is also fully capable of managing hosting providers, hiring, and the delivery of different projects, particularly in quite critical cases involving health data hosting or highly confidential data, the hiring of business and technical experts, or projects with very precise deadlines and major associated stakes.

An external CTO is particularly effective when it comes to reducing a company’s IT costs. First, by identifying the various tools that can be replaced by free solutions or simply terminated because of unused licenses or redundant tools. But above all, an external CTO brings technical expertise drawn from all the projects they have encountered throughout their experience, by reviewing the prices of different technical providers to avoid paying abnormally high rates, notably by negotiating daily rates and discussing with providers how many days are actually required to complete the work. This can notably involve identifying existing solutions or overstated costs for tasks that could be automated in development. It makes it possible to have a real trusted partner internally, so the company does not end up in a situation where it lacks the technical expertise needed to discuss provider pricing. An external CTO is also extremely useful when optimizing infrastructure costs, with servers that may be poorly sized and therefore more resource-hungry than what is actually needed for the company. Through audits, they can even identify ways to optimize solutions in order to reduce server size, which can produce significant savings. At Koragence, the external CTO also has strong expertise in artificial intelligence and its use in business, as well as in information systems and enterprise architecture. This helps avoid unnecessary developments that will end up as gimmicks or fail to be worthwhile in terms of value added, while also making it possible to implement process automations with artificial intelligence, which would not have been possible before. They can also identify technical debt and renegotiate certain supplier contracts.

The criteria for choosing an external CTO include experience, both in years and in the sectors and company sizes in which the CTO has worked. This makes it possible to assess their ability to understand the business, not just the technology. Their independence from suppliers should also be taken into account, so they do not make biased choices toward organizations with which they are partners or from which they receive commissions, as well as their ability to communicate clearly with leadership that does not necessarily share their technical expertise. Other highly important criteria are their references, so you can determine whether they have the required experience to be the right external CTO. A good external CTO also has cybersecurity experience so they can promote best practices and have the right reflexes during audits. At Koragence, we provide our experts and our experience through our external CTO and interim CTO offering. They have an average of 15 years of experience in various organizations, with support from our different business experts depending on the sector and type of company, whether private, public, or startup. This notably includes business expertise in pharmaceuticals, industrial production, construction, financial and banking compliance, aerospace, enterprise architecture, agriculture, transportation, and education, among many others.