About

Field notes from two decades of C-suite technology advisory. Real engagements, real decisions, and the frameworks that helped executive leaders navigate platform investment, architecture governance, and large-scale transformation — from government defence departments to global banking institutions.

Filter by:

Type:

Tag:

Brief · 7 min read

The Cloud Business Case That Didn't Survive the Data

A major emerging market bank set out to move everything to public cloud. The vendor tool showed 85% savings. The independent analysis told a different story — and that gap is where the real advisory work happens.

30 Jun 2025 Strategy Cloud

Brief · 8 min read

The Decision Your Infrastructure Team Is Getting Wrong: Mainframe Offload in Mission-Critical Environments

Most infrastructure migration proposals that land on a Department of Defence CTO's desk understate the cost and overstate the speed of transition. Here's what defence leaders need to understand before approving the offload.

23 Jun 2025 Strategy Government

Brief · 7 min read

Reference Technology Solutions: Bringing Architectural Coherence to Victorian Government ICT

Victorian government departments operate with genuine autonomy. Getting them to share an architectural language — without imposing a structure that destroys that autonomy — required a different approach to governance.

16 Jun 2025 Architecture Government

Brief · 7 min read

Architecture at National Scale: Advising the Architecture Review Board for an MHRD Solution at NIC

When MHRD set out to build a major digital infrastructure solution for hundreds of millions of citizens, the Architecture Review Board needed independent technical advisory to ensure the decisions made in the delivery team translated into a system that could actually serve that ambition.

9 Jun 2025 Architecture Government

Brief · 7 min read

The Hidden Cost in Government IT: Why Core Count Is the Number That Actually Matters

Advising a major East African revenue authority on cloud infrastructure revealed a pattern common to government IT: the visible cost is hardware, the real cost is software licensing tied to core count.

2 Jun 2025 Strategy Government

Brief · 8 min read

When the Platform Can't Scale: Performance Engineering in Global Wealth Management

Weeks before go-live on one of the world's largest wealth management platforms, a Java memory management problem threatened to bring everything down. Here's what fixing it — and preventing it from happening again — actually required.

26 May 2025 Engineering Performance

Brief · 8 min read

What Project Rescue Actually Looks Like: Rebuilding a Telco Platform in Kuala Lumpur

Greenfield projects let you design from first principles. Rescue projects make you work with what exists, fix what's broken, and keep the plane in the air while you do it. Here's what that required.

19 May 2025 Engineering Architecture

Brief · 7 min read

Trust Before Technology: Closing a Major Government IT Contract in the Middle East

In government IT procurement in the Gulf, the technical case is necessary but not sufficient. Here's what the negotiation that preceded a significant managed services contract actually required.

12 May 2025 Strategy Enterprise

Brief · 9 min read

What Happens When Your Vendor Has Skin in the Game: EA in São Paulo

A profit-sharing arrangement with a Brazilian conglomerate changed how every architecture decision got made. Here's what building an EA practice looks like when the incentives are aligned.

5 May 2025 Architecture Strategy

Brief · 9 min read

Transforming Telecom in Shenzhen: What 2008 SOA Built the Foundation For

Before microservices had a name, a project inside China's leading telecommunications equipment company was already thinking in services. Here's what that looked like from the inside.

28 Apr 2025 Engineering Architecture

Brief · 8 min read

Building at Scale in China: What the Architecture Textbooks Don't Cover

Nine months leading the platform design for one of China's largest e-commerce builds taught me that the hardest problems weren't technical — they were structural and cultural.

21 Apr 2025 Engineering Architecture