FREE WORKBOOK
Is your business ready for a Virtual CIO?
Ten questions, a score out of 30, and an honest read on where your technology strategy has gaps. Built for leadership teams, not IT departments.
Most businesses don't fail at technology because they bought the wrong thing. They fail because nobody senior was ever accountable for the direction. This workbook takes about 30 minutes with your leadership team and tells you exactly where you stand.
Technology Strategy
Virtual CIO
Readiness
Workbook
Ten questions that tell you whether your business needs strategic technology leadership.
LOOKUP · 320 Princes Highway, Rockdale NSW 2216 · 1300 553 559 · lookup.com.au
Get the workbook
Sent to your inbox in under a minute.
What's inside
The ten areas
Business goals, security, Microsoft 365, continuity, governance, budget, roadmap, AI readiness and measurement.
What good looks like
Three plain-English criteria for every area, so you're scoring against something real rather than a feeling.
A score out of 30
Transfer your answers to a summary page and get a total, plus a readiness band that says what to do first.
Space to write
Room against every area to record where you are today, who owns it and when it gets reviewed.
The four readiness bands
0 to 9
Reactive
Technology is handled issue by issue. It works until it suddenly doesn't.
10 to 17
Developing
The fundamentals exist but they're carried by individuals, not by the business.
18 to 24
Managed
Well run day to day, with no deliberate plan for the next three years.
25 to 30
Strategic
Genuinely governed. The value now is challenge and independence.
Most businesses are surprised by where they land.
Who this is for
This is written for the person who has to answer for technology at a leadership level. If that's you, it will be useful whether or not you ever speak to us.
Where these ten areas come from
The ten areas aren't arbitrary. They're the checkpoints of the LOOKUP Business Modernisation Framework, the structure every one of our Virtual CIO engagements runs on. It moves a business from understanding what it's trying to achieve, through reducing risk, to being genuinely ready to adopt AI.
That's why the workbook scores you on ownership and review cycles rather than on whether you own a particular product. A business can buy every tool on the market and still sit at the bottom of the scale, because nobody is accountable for the direction. The framework measures the thing that actually predicts whether technology helps you.
Discover
Understand the business goals
Secure
Reduce the business risk
Modernise
Improve the technology platforms
Standardise
Reduce operational complexity
Optimise
Improve day-to-day productivity
Prepare
Get ready for AI
Implement
Deploy the business solutions
Improve
Review and keep refining
Frequently asked questions
Twelve pages. Ten areas of technology strategy, each with a short explanation of why it matters and three plain-English criteria describing what good looks like. You score each one from 0 to 3, transfer the scores to a summary page, and get a total out of 30 with a readiness band and a recommended starting point.
About 30 minutes if you do it properly, with the right people in the room. It's deliberately short enough to finish in one sitting. A workbook that takes half a day doesn't get completed.
No. It's written for business leaders, not IT departments. Every criterion is in plain English, and where a technical term is unavoidable it's explained in the same sentence.
The people who make the decisions. Usually the owner or managing director, whoever holds the budget, and whoever currently carries technology. It works better as a conversation than as a form one person completes alone.
You get the PDF by email straight away. We'll follow up once to ask whether it was useful and whether you'd like to go through your scores. If you'd rather we didn't, say so and that's the end of it.
The workbook is genuinely usable on its own, and plenty of people will fill it in and never speak to us. It's built so the answers are yours rather than ours. We'd obviously like some readers to become clients, which is why we're giving it away.
Most businesses between 10 and 250 staff land somewhere between 10 and 17 out of 30. That band means the fundamentals exist but they're carried by individuals rather than by the business. It's the most common result and the most fragile.
Then you've learned something cheaply. A low score isn't a judgement, it's a map of where the risk is concentrated. The workbook tells you which two or three areas to start with for every band, so a low total comes with a starting point attached.
Get the Virtual CIO Readiness Workbook
Twelve pages. About 30 minutes. No obligation.
Get the workbookLooking for more? Explore our Virtual CIO service, cyber security, Microsoft 365, and AI readiness offerings.
