KhaqanWhat is fractional Head of IT?
A fractional Head of IT is an experienced IT leader who works for a company part time, typically a fixed number of days a month, taking ownership of the IT strategy, systems, suppliers and risks that a full-time Head of IT would own.
The word fractional comes from finance, where a fractional CFO has been common for years. The model is the same: a business that has outgrown ad hoc IT support, but is not large enough to employ a senior technologist full time, retains one for a fraction of their week. The role is leadership, not helpdesk. It covers the ERP roadmap, security and access, backups and recovery, supplier and licence management, the decision about what to build and what to buy, and the honest conversation with the owners about risk.
It matters because the gap it fills is real and expensive. A company of a few dozen to a few hundred people typically has an outsourced support provider who fixes laptops and a software vendor who sells modules, and nobody whose job is to say no, to sequence the work, or to notice that the database is out of support and the last restore test was never done. Those are the failures that stop a business, and they are leadership failures rather than technical ones.
An example engagement: two days a month, starting with an ERP health check, then a twelve-month plan with the three or four changes that matter, then a monthly review in which the fractional head chairs the meetings with the ERP partner, the support provider and finance. The company gets a senior person accountable for outcomes without paying for a full-time seat.
The common mistake is buying hours rather than ownership. If the engagement is measured in tickets closed, it is outsourced support with a grander title. The other is choosing someone who has never run systems inside a real company; a fractional head is useful precisely because they have carried responsibility for an ERP that whole sites depend on.
Related terms
- ERP health check: An ERP health check is a structured review of an ERP system that tests whether its data, customisations, integrations, backups, performance and user access are sound, and produces a prioritised list of risks and fixes before they turn into outages or wrong numbers.
- ERP (enterprise resource planning): Enterprise resource planning (ERP) software runs a company's core operations, such as finance, purchasing, inventory, sales, manufacturing and HR, from one shared database, so a transaction entered once in one department is visible and correct everywhere else.
- point-in-time recovery (PITR): Point-in-time recovery (PITR) is a database backup method, standard in PostgreSQL, that combines a base backup with a continuous archive of write-ahead log (WAL) files, so the database can be restored to any chosen moment, not only to the time of the last backup.