Advisory
Systems audit, architecture review, and decisions an organization will live inside for years.
This work does not build anything, which is what makes it useful. An organization deciding whether to replace a system, buy a platform, or commit to an architecture is making a decision with a long half-life and usually only one chance to make it. The value of an outside read is that it has no stake in which answer wins.
The work covers systems audits, architecture review, build-versus-buy analysis, and technology strategy for organizations facing a decision large enough that being wrong is expensive.
A systems audit is read-only. We examine what exists, what it costs to run, what is load-bearing, what is undocumented, where the single points of failure are, and what will break next. The deliverable is a written report with findings ordered by consequence instead of by how interesting they were to find.
Findings carry evidence. A finding that says a system is fragile is an opinion; a finding that says a service can be released only one way, has nowhere to test a change before it goes live, and depends on a credential held by one person is a description. The report is written so that someone who disagrees with a recommendation can still verify the facts it rests on.
Build-versus-buy analysis is done with the total cost of the buy path stated honestly, including the parts vendors do not quote: moving the existing data, connecting the tool to everything else, the workflows that will have to change to fit it, and the exit cost if the decision is reversed in three years. We have a commercial interest in the build answer, which is exactly why that interest is disclosed in the report and why the analysis is written to be checkable.
The recommendation is sometimes to do nothing. A system that works badly but predictably, and that nobody has to touch, is frequently a worse candidate for replacement than a system that works well but is about to lose its only maintainer. Urgency is a property of the risk, not of the annoyance.
Advisory engagements are scoped and time-boxed rather than open-ended, and the report belongs to the client. There is no arrangement in which an audit's findings are contingent on subsequent work being awarded, because a report written under that condition is not worth reading.
Where an audit finds something we could fix, that is stated as a finding and not as a proposal. The distinction matters: a report that reads as a sales document has failed at the thing it was hired to do, however accurate its contents.
7 pages.
The systems audit
A read-only account of what an organization actually has, ordered by consequence and written to be checked by someone who disagrees with it.
Build versus buy
The quoted price is the reliable number and rarely the deciding one; the analysis is costed over a stated horizon with the commercial conflict disclosed in the document.
Architecture review
A design is cheapest to change while it is still a document, so the review happens before the commitment, not after it.
Findings and evidence
What separates a report that changes something from one that gets filed is whether each claim arrived checkable.
The case for doing nothing
Urgency is a property of risk, not of annoyance, and the recommendation to leave a system alone is the one most often left unmade.
Vendor and platform selection
Feature lists converge between finalists; what separates them is renewal terms, data portability, and what happens after the invoice is paid.
Independence
Arrangements that make the firm's interest visible and checkable, since no advisor can credibly claim to have none.
What Advisory does not take on.
- Audits contingent on being awarded the resulting work.
- Vendor referral fees, commissions, or reseller margins of any kind.
- Recommendations without stated evidence, or findings ordered by anything other than consequence.