White papers
Twenty-six years of lessons, written down.
Practical, vendor-neutral papers from our consulting work. No hype, no sales pitch in disguise — the same advice we give paying clients.
The Mid-Market AI Playbook: From Pilot to Production
Most AI initiatives in mid-sized companies die between the demo and the deployment. This paper lays out the sequencing that survives contact with reality — data readiness first, workflow integration second, model selection last — with a candid section on the projects you shouldn't start at all. Includes a readiness checklist used in our own engagements.
Modernizing Legacy Applications Without Stopping the Business
The case against the big-bang rewrite, drawn from two decades of modernization work. Covers the strangler pattern in practice, how to sequence migrations when the documentation is wrong and the original engineers are gone, and the political — not technical — reasons most modernizations fail. With a decision framework: rehost, refactor, rebuild, or retire.
The Global Delivery Model, 25 Years On
We've run distributed delivery since before it was fashionable, through every tooling generation from ISDN lines to AI pair-programmers. What actually makes offshore work: overlap hours that are protected, ownership that is explicit, demos that are relentless — and the three failure patterns that account for nearly every horror story you've heard.
Data Governance Before Data Science
Why analytics programs stall: not for lack of dashboards, but for lack of definitions. This paper makes the unglamorous case for governance as the first investment — ownership, lineage, and a warehouse model the whole business agrees on — and shows how to do it in quarters, not years, at mid-market scale.
Staffing in the AI Era: Building Teams That Last
AI is changing what junior and senior engineering work look like — and most hiring strategies haven't noticed. Drawing on twenty-six years in technology staffing, this paper examines which roles are converging, which skills are appreciating, and how to structure teams (and contracts) for a decade in which the tools change every quarter.
Fixed Cost, T&M, or Dedicated Team: Choosing the Right Engagement Model
The engagement model determines project behavior more than any methodology does. A short, blunt guide to matching the commercial structure to the problem: when fixed-price protects you, when it quietly works against you, and when a dedicated team is cheaper than it looks.
Papers are provided on request while the downloads section of our new site is being completed — use the contact form and name the paper you'd like.
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