Monthly fee
A data leader, without putting one on payroll.
A fractional CDO does what a Chief Data Officer or Head of Data would do in-house, part-time and for a monthly fee. You don't pay by the hour: you pay for having the metrics in order and the data decisions well made, whether that takes one hour or fifteen. And because we're European, compliance isn't an add-on: it's how the work is designed.
What the fee includes.
- A data committee with leadership: which metrics reconcile, which don't and what has to be decided.
- Your leadership metrics under watch, with the KPI dictionary maintained and each metric owned by a business owner and a technical owner.
- The 3-D filter — data, definition, decision-maker — before a euro is spent on any data or AI initiative.
- Vendor proposals for data and AI reviewed before you sign them, and the cloud bill reviewed before it climbs without explanation.
- Data policy kept current: retention, anonymisation and compliance with GDPR, the Data Act and the AI Act, alongside your legal counsel.
- A quarterly data and AI roadmap, prioritised by return.
- Every month, at least one new finding for the business: something you couldn't see before.
What it doesn't include.
Delivery. Pipelines, dashboards and models are built by your team, a partner or our engineers, as a separate project. Who, you decide; the fee makes sure what gets built is what was decided.
That separation is deliberate: whoever supervises has no interest in the project being bigger than it needs to be.
Compared with hiring a Head of Data.
A Head of Data costs £85,000–140,000 a year in base salary in the UK — more in London — plus employer costs, months of recruiting and the risk of hiring wrong. And they arrive alone, to a company where it isn't yet clear what the job is.
A fractional CDO costs a fraction of that, is working from the first month and can be ended with one month's notice. They arrive with the method built and with what was learned at other companies at the same point.
The goal is to stop being needed.
When your company needs a full-time data leader, the last job of the fee is helping you hire one: defining the role, interviewing and handing over. You keep someone who walks into a job that's already in order.
Frequently asked questions
- What is a fractional CDO?
- A data leader who works for your company part-time, for a monthly fee, instead of on payroll. They make sure the metrics leadership decides with are reliable, prioritise data and AI initiatives, and supervise whoever delivers them.
- Is it the same as a fractional Head of Data?
- Yes. Fractional CDO, fractional Head of Data, part-time data leader or CDO as a service all describe the same thing: senior data leadership without the cost or commitment of a full-time hire.
- When does a company need a fractional CDO?
- When leadership decides with figures that don't reconcile between departments, when the CTO carries data on top of everything else, or when the company wants to bring in AI and doesn't know whether its data can carry it. Usually between 20 and 250 employees, before there's an in-house data team.
- How does it start?
- With the metrics audit: two weeks to leave your ten leadership metrics under one definition, two owners and reconciling. With that on the table, the fee starts from a measured baseline, not an opinion.
- Why isn't the price published?
- Because it depends on how many departments, systems and metrics there are to run. It's explained on the first call, with your numbers in front of us and compared with what an in-house data leader would cost you.