Technology Advisor
You don't need a full-time CTO. You need someone technical you can trust when making expensive technology decisions.
- Who this is for
- Nonprofits, associations, education organizations, professional services firms, and family-run businesses. Organizations that depend on software and outside vendors, but have nobody internal whose job it is to evaluate either.
This sounds familiar if…
- A vendor has quoted you for a project and you can't tell whether the number is fair.
- Someone is proposing software you don't fully understand.
- Staff spend hours every week on work a computer should be doing.
- Your systems don't talk to each other, and everyone has a workaround.
- You're being told you should be using AI, and nobody can say where it would actually help.
- A project is going badly and you can't tell whose fault it is.
- You need someone technical in the room who is working for you.
One or two of these is normal. Four or five usually means the cause sits underneath all of them.
How I help
I sit on your side of the table. I read the proposals, ask the vendor the questions you'd ask if you knew which ones to ask, and tell you plainly what I'd do.
Sometimes that's "this is a fair price and they know what they're doing." Sometimes it's "you don't need this at all." Both are useful, and the second one is usually worth more.
The cheapest technology project is the one you talk yourself out of. A good advisor saves you more by what they stop than by what they build.
Technology Assessment
Start with a Technology Assessment
I spend time understanding how your organization actually works, rather than how the org chart says it works. Then I answer one question: what should you improve, replace, automate, buy, build, or simply leave alone?
What I look at
- How the work really gets done, day to day
- The tools and systems you already pay for
- What's still done by hand, and how long it takes
- Where the friction is, according to the people in it
- Projects coming up in the next year
- Your vendors and what they're delivering
- What you're currently spending, and on what
What you get back
- A short roadmap in plain language. What's worth doing, in what order, and roughly what each one involves.
- Which tools to keep, which to drop, and which you're paying for twice.
- Where automation would genuinely give staff time back, with the hours attached.
- Where a vendor is worth the money, and where you'd be buying something you don't need.
- What I'd leave exactly as it is.
- How long
- Scoped per organization
- Language
- English or Hebrew
- Where
- Tel Aviv, or remote
It depends on the size of the organization and how many systems are involved. A first conversation costs nothing and usually makes the shape clear.
Where this usually goes.
Take the letter instead.
I've written about this.
Not marketing pieces. Just the parts I was still thinking about after work.
Two other things I get called about.
Tell me what's going on.
A few sentences is plenty. What's happening, roughly how big the team or organization is, and the thing you'd fix first if you had the time.