OFFICE OF THE CIO
Modern technology. Delivered, not just advised.
We build the stack you'll scale on, secure the business so customers and regulators trust you, run the operation day to day, ship the product faster, and bring AI into the work where it earns its place. The team at every level the work demands.
WHY THIS FRAMING
Technology is too important to advise without delivering.
The Office of the CIO at most professional services firms is an advisory function. They produce roadmaps, target operating models, vendor recommendations, and strategy decks. The implementation goes to a different vendor — usually a systems integrator or a staff-augmentation shop — and the strategy doesn't always survive contact with the implementation.
We organize the Office of the CIO around delivery. Architecture, security, IT operations, product engineering, and AI adoption — all five disciplines staffed with practitioners who can advise and build. The strategy and the build come from the same team. The accountability stays with one firm.
This matters more in technology than almost anywhere else in the business. The decisions are too consequential and the gap between strategy and execution is where most technology programs fail.
WHAT WE DELIVER
Five sub-areas. One Office.
Scope, team shape, and price are set per engagement after the discovery call. We don't publish ranges — every situation is different and the conversation is the work.
Build the Stack
Modern architecture and core technology infrastructure — the stack the business runs on. ERP selection and implementation. Cloud foundations. Financial systems. Data architecture. The systems-of-record that hold the business together.
Secure the Business
Cybersecurity, compliance readiness, and risk management. The work that keeps the business defensible when customers, regulators, auditors, insurers, and adversaries all want different things.
Run the Operation
IT operations and managed services. Day-to-day technology operations — help desk, identity management, endpoint management, application support, network operations. The unglamorous work that keeps the business running.
Ship the Product
Software engineering and product delivery. The work that ships features, builds platforms, scales applications, and integrates systems. For businesses where technology is the product, or where custom software is core to differentiation.
Adopt the AI
AI strategy, agent design, governance, deployment, and adoption. The work of figuring out where AI fits in the business, what it costs to deploy responsibly, what risks come with it, and how to actually move from pilot to production.
STACK SPECIALIZATION
We're deliberate about the stack we know best.
PluggedIn has deep working fluency in the Microsoft stack — Azure, Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, Power Platform, Sentinel, Defender, Entra, Purview, Intune, Copilot for Microsoft 365, Azure OpenAI Service, and the surrounding ecosystem. For Microsoft-heavy environments, that fluency reduces discovery time and helps us identify platform constraints earlier.
We work in other clouds too — AWS, Google Cloud, hybrid environments — and our network includes practitioners with deep depth in those ecosystems. But we don't pretend to be vendor-agnostic for the sake of being agnostic. If your business runs on Microsoft, that's where we'll deliver our deepest work. If it doesn't, we'll be honest about which parts of our stack fluency apply and which don't.
WORKING ALONGSIDE OTHERS
We work with your team, your vendors, and your incumbent firms.
Most Office of the CIO engagements run alongside existing technology functions — internal IT teams, external systems integrators, software vendors, managed services providers, and other advisory firms. We add practitioner depth where it's missing; we don't try to displace working relationships.
Common configurations include working alongside an internal IT director who needs practitioner partnership on a specific initiative, partnering with a systems integrator on an implementation while we hold the business-side accountability, taking over from a managed services provider that isn't performing, or co-leading an AI initiative with internal product or engineering teams.
We're explicit at the start of every engagement about who does what. Engagements with a clear scope of our work, your team's work, and the vendor handoffs perform measurably better than engagements where the boundaries are ambiguous.
HOW WE STRUCTURE WORK
Three engagement shapes for technology work.
Project Engagement
Defined scope, defined timeline, defined outcome. Common for ERP selections, security build-outs, AI deployments, and other bounded technology initiatives.
Fractional Leadership
Practitioner embedded into your technology leadership cadence. Common configurations include fractional CIO, fractional CTO, fractional CISO, or combined fractional CIO+CISO.
Full Engagement
Operational ownership of a technology function or initiative. Outsourced IT operations. Managed AI governance program. Full transformation program ownership.
Tell us what the technology needs to do, and what's getting in the way.
The Office of the CIO is broad. Every engagement starts with a discovery call to understand which sub-areas need attention, which stack you run on, and what your team can carry. We'll tell you within one conversation whether we're the right partner.
Or explore Office of the CFO and Strategy & Transformation to see the full picture.