The Operational Intelligence assessment runs the organisation through twelve domains — infrastructure, support, security, business continuity, governance, data, risk, project and change management, user experience, innovation, and emerging technology. Each domain is scored against a five-level maturity model, from initial through to optimising.

The output is a written report, a 90-minute findings walkthrough, and a prioritised action list — what to do first, what can wait, and what doesn’t need doing at all.

The assessment is fixed-scope, fixed-fee, and bounded. You know what you’re committing to before we start. Two variants sized to the complexity of the organisation — one for institutional and mission-led organisations with multi-stakeholder governance, one for owner-operator businesses making the call themselves.

Digital Systems Design is a discrete engagement that produces a current-state map, a future-state architecture, an integration and data-flow design, and a vendor brief. The work is sized to the scope — typically four to twelve weeks for the design itself, with optional implementation oversight through the build.

We design the system. Your delivery partner builds it. We stay in the room as the architect-of-record while the build runs, holding the design to a standard and surfacing decisions before they become problems.

The Virtual CIO Service is a monthly retainer. Strategic oversight, executive presence, vendor governance, project oversight, governance reporting and decision support. We don’t deliver the technology itself — your MSP and internal team handle that. We sit a layer above, making sure the strategy is right and the right decisions get made for the right reasons.

This is the natural step after a diagnostic. The prioritised actions become a sequenced roadmap. Quarterly priorities get set, projects get oversight, vendors get held to account, and the organisation gets a coherent technology position.

Three tiers — pick the one that fits the cadence you need:

Foundation — quarterly leadership conversations, on-call advisory, annual priorities refresh.

Strategic — monthly leadership meeting attendance, project oversight, quarterly governance-pack preparation.

Executive — sits in the leadership team, owns the technology agenda, attends governance meetings.

One month’s notice to scale, switch, or end. No long contracts.

A diagnostic is the front door. It tells you where you stand and what to do about it.

What comes next depends on the work. If the priority is a specific architectural piece — a website, an application, a workflow — Digital Systems Design is the right engagement. If the need is an ongoing senior voice across the whole technology agenda, the Virtual CIO Service is the right shape. Some clients run both — Digital Systems Design for the architectural piece, vCIO for the ongoing relationship.

You don’t need to commit to anything beyond the diagnostic up front. Most clients sit with the findings before deciding the next step. Some start with vCIO Foundation, some go straight to Strategic, some run a discrete Design engagement and then decide. A few don’t need a retainer at all and just want a once-a-year refresh. That’s fine too.