Practice area
Senior technology leadership at the table, without a permanent hire.
A fractional or interim CIO or CISO is an experienced technology executive who takes the seat part-time or for a fixed term. They run the technology agenda, own the decisions, and represent the function to your board, your auditors and your customers until a permanent leader is in place or is no longer needed.
01 / 04Overview
How does Fractional CIO & CISO work?
There is a stage where a company is too big to run technology by committee and too early to justify a full-time executive. There is also the harder version: the seat is empty, a search is running, and decisions are stacking up behind it. Both are what this practice is for. A fractional leader arrives with the authority to make calls — vendor contracts, architecture direction, security posture, the yes and no on projects — and with the habit of writing things down so the next person inherits a working function rather than a personality. The engagement is scoped to a defined mandate and a defined exit: either a permanent hire is placed, or the mandate closes because the work is done. We are explicit about that end state from the first conversation, because an interim leader who becomes indispensable has failed.
02 / 04Deliverables
What do you get?
- 01
A defined mandate
What the seat owns, what it does not, who it reports to and what "done" looks like — agreed in writing before the engagement starts rather than discovered three months in.
- 02
Operating cadence
The meetings, reporting line and decision rights that make the function run: a board or executive update, a risk register that is actually reviewed, and a project list with owners and dates.
- 03
Standing decisions, documented
Architecture, vendor and security decisions recorded with their reasoning, so they survive the handover instead of being relitigated by whoever comes next.
- 04
Succession and handover plan
The specification for the permanent hire — scope, seniority, comp band, first-year objectives — plus a handover pack. PRI Technology can then run that search on the staffing side.
Why us, specifically
THG-style marketplaces broker other people’s fractional executives. We place the interim leader and, when the mandate closes, run the permanent search through PRI Technology’s executive-technology desk — one firm, both halves.
03 / 04Fit
Is this the right engagement for you?
Who buys this
- Private-equity-backed and mid-market companies between technology leaders
- Founders whose technology function has outgrown informal ownership
- Boards that need an accountable name against technology and security risk
Call us when
- There is no senior technology voice in executive meetings.
- Your CIO or CISO has left and the search will take months.
- A customer or insurer is asking who owns security, and the honest answer is nobody.
- Technology decisions are being made by whoever is loudest in the room.
- You need a leader for a defined programme, not a permanent headcount.
04 / 04FAQ
Questions we get asked
Start with a conversation, not a proposal.
Tell us what you are dealing with. If it is work we should do, we will tell you what a bounded assessment of it looks like. If it is not, we will tell you that too.