Strategy & Advisory

Technology strategy in a mid-sized business is rarely written down, which means it is set by whoever raised the most recent problem. A renewal forces a licensing decision. An incident forces a security decision. A departing staff member forces a documentation decision. The articles in this topic are about replacing that with a sequence somebody chose deliberately, sized to a real budget and a real team.

The roadmap material covers how to build a two to three year plan that survives contact with cash flow: separating remediation from improvement, staging work so each phase produces a usable outcome, and expressing risk in terms a board will act on rather than a severity rating. Budgeting gets covered with the operating versus capital shift that cloud creates, and the recurring cost lines that catch organisations out after a migration.

Fractional and part-time CIO engagements get practical treatment: what a senior advisor should own, how vendor management and internal IT relate to that role, and how to measure the engagement. Digital transformation is written about narrowly and unfashionably — process first, then platform — because the failures we are called into are almost always process problems that were handed to a technology project.

This topic also holds our business application material, including Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. There is not yet enough of that writing to justify a hub of its own, so it lives here alongside the strategy and process-improvement work, which is where those decisions actually get made. Finance and operations system selection, ERP and CRM scope, and the integration questions with Microsoft 365 are covered from the same starting point: what the business needs to do differently, before what software will do it.