CZAR Technology Group is a technology leadership and advisory firm focused on helping small and mid-market organizations turn IT into a strategic advantage. We combine hands-on executive experience (CIO/COO) with practical delivery expertise to accelerate transformation, reduce risk, and unlock measurable business value.

• We treat your business as if it were our own.
• We speak both "boardroom" and "in the trenches."
• We prioritize clear outcomes over slideware.
• We are vendor-agnostic and bias-free.

After 30+ years leading IT organizations, including roles as CIO and COO, I founded CZAR Technology Group around a simple premise: small and mid-sized organizations need executive IT leadership, but most can't justify (or don't want) a full-time CIO.

The traditional options are:

• Promote a technical person into leadership (rarely works, great engineers don't always make great strategists)
• Hire a full-time CIO ($200K-$300K+ loaded cost, plus the risk of a bad hire)
• Hire a big consulting firm (junior consultants using templates, massive fees, no accountability post-engagement)
• "Wing it" with AI and Google (cheap, but you're gambling your business on your own pattern recognition)

CZAR offers a fifth option: Direct access to an experienced CIO who's actually done the job, stays accountable through execution, and costs a fraction of a full-time hire.

Let's be direct: AI has changed the consulting landscape. It can now draft IT policies, generate vendor comparisons, and outline technology roadmaps in minutes.

So why hire a fractional CIO instead of using ChatGPT?

Because strategy without execution is just expensive documentation. And execution in real organizations requires things AI fundamentally cannot provide:

Political Navigation

We've integrated acquisitions where the acquiring and acquired IT teams refused to speak to each other. We've unified three department heads around a single platform after 18 months of deadlock. AI can't read a room, build consensus, or know when to push and when to wait.

Judgment Under Pressure

When systems fail at 2 AM, when vendors overpromise and underdeliver, when budgets get cut mid-project, these require judgment calls based on pattern recognition from hundreds of similar situations. AI provides options; experience makes the call.

Accountability

When an implementation goes sideways, AI doesn't answer to your board. When vendor promises don't match reality, AI doesn't renegotiate contracts. When priorities conflict, AI doesn't make the tough call.

Context and Constraint Recognition

Your "cloud-first strategy" might be constrained by a legacy contract. Your "best-practice ERP implementation" might ignore your company's cultural resistance to change. Your "digital transformation" might need to happen around key people who aren't going anywhere. AI doesn't know this. Experienced CIOs do.

We use AI extensively, for research, documentation and analysis. It makes us more efficient and lets us deliver more value. But the hard parts of IT leadership, the judgment, the politics, and the accountability still require humans who've successfully done the job before.