Colin Boothe
Build an IT roadmap with no CIO by starting from the dates you do not control. Four quarters, one page, and a clear split between the lines that need a fractional CIO and the lines that need contract project staff.
By Colin Boothe, CIO at Foretopia A Shopify NetSuite integration usually breaks at peak in three places: orders edited after they sync, refunds that lose their line detail, and Shopify Payments payouts that land as one net number nobody can match. Choose connector, iPaaS, or custom build by doing the call arithmetic for your busiest … Read more
By Colin Boothe, CIO at Foretopia NetSuite AP automation is a choice between the native stack (Bill Capture, SuiteApprovals, Intelligent Payment Automation) and a third-party AP tool synced to NetSuite, decided by invoice volume, approval complexity, and where your vendors get paid. Native usually holds for U.S. companies with mostly PO-backed spend. A bolt-on earns … Read more
By Colin Boothe, CIO at Foretopia The best Shopify ERP for a brand adding wholesale, EDI, and a 3PL is NetSuite above roughly $20 million in revenue, Business Central for Microsoft shops below that, and Acumatica when per-user licensing would wreck the budget. Everything else on the usual lists is an inventory tool wearing an … Read more
By Colin Boothe, CIO at Foretopia Every company is now a technology company because the way it takes orders, ships product, bills customers, and figures out whether it made money all runs on software. So technology decisions are business decisions now, whether leadership treats them that way or not. That doesn’t mean you should go … Read more
By Colin Boothe, CIO at Foretopia Managing developers when you’re not technical works if you manage outcomes instead of code: define finished in business terms, look at working software every week, and borrow technical judgment for the calls you can’t make yourself. You don’t need to read the code. You need to stop pretending the … Read more
By Colin Boothe, CIO at Foretopia A rentable CIO is a fractional chief information officer a mid-market company hires for one or two days a week, renting senior technology judgment by the month instead of buying a full-time executive it cannot justify. The word rent is doing real work there. You’re not acquiring a person. … Read more
By Colin Boothe, CIO at Foretopia A fractional CIO is a senior, part-time chief information officer who owns a company’s technology decisions, usually one or two days a week, for a monthly fee instead of a full-time executive salary. The difference from a consultant is ownership. A fractional CIO makes the call and answers for … Read more
By Colin Boothe, CIO at Foretopia Build vs buy software decisions hinge on whether a process is the reason customers choose you over a competitor. If it is, customize it or build it. If it isn’t, adopt the software’s standard process and change how your team works. Most mid-market build requests fail that test. The … Read more
By Colin Boothe, CIO at Foretopia A custom AI assistant for business is a chat tool that answers questions from your own documents and records, by searching them first and handing the relevant passages to a language model along with the question. Training a model is rarely any part of the job. What these things … Read more
