Outsourced IT director

An IT director, without the salary

One senior person who owns your technology decisions, your suppliers, your security posture and your continuity plan. Not a helpdesk, and not a full-time hire.

Book a conversation

What is an outsourced IT director?

An outsourced IT director is someone senior who owns the technology side of your business a few hours a month, instead of a few days a week. They make and own the decisions a director would make: which systems you run, whether a supplier is doing what you pay them for, how exposed you are, and what happens when something breaks or someone leaves.

It exists because of a specific gap. Businesses of ten or twenty people have real technology decisions to make and nobody whose job it is to make them. The owner ends up doing it between everything else, usually by asking whoever sold them the last thing.

Fit

Is this the right thing to buy?

This is a narrow service and it is not right for everyone. Here is where the line sits.

It fits if

  • You have roughly 1 to 20 staff and nobody technical at a senior level.
  • Technology decisions keep landing on you, and you are guessing.
  • You have suppliers you cannot really evaluate.
  • A customer or insurer has started asking questions you cannot answer.
  • One person understands too much of how things work.

It does not fit if

  • You need a helpdesk. If the problem is broken laptops and password resets, you want a managed service provider, not a director. Buy that instead.
  • You are building software as your product and need someone leading a development team full time.
  • You want someone to rubber-stamp a decision you have already made.

If you are weighing this against hiring someone, the three jobs owners tend to conflate is worth ten minutes first. If you are not sure you need this level of help at all, the honest answer is often no.

Scope

What does an outsourced IT director actually do?

Five things, consistently. Not a menu to pick from, because they tend to fail together.

Decisions

Which system, whether to replace or leave alone, whether the quote in front of you is fair. Decisions get made and written down, so the reasoning survives the meeting.

Suppliers

Someone who can read the contract, ask the awkward question and tell you whether you are getting what you pay for. Most businesses have at least one supplier relationship nobody has reviewed in years.

Security posture

Where you are actually exposed, in plain terms, and what is worth fixing first. Increasingly this is driven by a customer, an insurer or a tender asking for evidence you do not have yet.

Continuity

What happens when a system fails, a supplier disappears or the one person who understands it all hands in their notice. Documented, and tested rather than assumed.

AI judgement calls

Which of it is worth your attention and which is noise. Mostly this means saying no to things, and being specific about the few places it genuinely pays back. We use these tools daily in our own delivery work, which is a better basis for advice than having read about them.

How it works

How does the engagement work?

Deliberately unglamorous.

A conversation first. An hour, no charge, no obligation. Often it ends with us telling you that you need something cheaper than this.

Then a look at what you have. Systems, suppliers, exposure, and where the single points of failure are. You get that written down whether or not you carry on with us. It is yours.

Then a standing rhythm. A regular slot for decisions, plus availability when something lands unexpectedly. Scope and cost agreed up front, reviewed openly, cancellable.

The longer version is on how it works. When something needs building rather than deciding, that runs as separate, scoped delivery work.

Who would you be working with?

Sam Jenkins. MEng in Computer Science, PRINCE2 and ITIL qualified, with a background delivering software and services in government and other environments where getting it wrong is expensive. Solutions Delivered has been trading since 2019 and is based in the North West, working with businesses across the UK.

You would be working with him directly. That is the point of the service and also its limit: it does not scale to a large estate, which is why the fit section above is as narrow as it is.

You should check any of that. Here is the checklist we would want you to run on us, including where to verify each claim free.

Questions

Common questions

The work overlaps, but the labels are sold to different buyers. "Fractional CTO" grew up around funded startups with in-house development teams, and the scope usually leans towards building a product. An outsourced IT director is the older, UK-native framing: someone who owns the technology a business runs on. If you are an owner-managed business rather than a startup, the second one usually fits better.

It depends on how much of the role you need, so we scope it in a conversation rather than publishing a rate card that would be wrong for most people. What we can tell you is the shape: this is advisory-weighted, measured in a few hours a month rather than days a week, and deliberately cheaper than the build-weighted engagements the fractional CTO market is priced around.

Yes, but that is a separate conversation. The director role is about deciding what should be built, bought or left alone. If something does need building, we can do it, or we can help you brief and manage whoever does. Keeping those two jobs distinct is deliberate: an adviser who only ever recommends their own build work is not an adviser.

No, and you should be wary of anyone who says it does. A support provider fixes things. A director decides things: whether that contract is good value, whether the backups are actually tested, whether the quote in front of you is fair. Those are different jobs and they work better with different people doing them.

The first conversation costs nothing and usually tells you whether this is the right shape of help. If it is, we agree what the first ninety days look like before anything is signed.

Book a conversation

An hour, no charge. If it is not the right thing for you, we will say so and point you at what is.

Get in touch