Articles
You can find all my written resources in one convenient location.
Essays, playbooks, and reflections on AI, digital transformation, leadership, industries, and life in the digital bubble.
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What 25 Years Across Three Continents Taught Me About Change
Early in my career, one mistyped command deleted every scheduled job in the environment. Ten engineers spent a day restoring it. That afternoon taught me why change discipline exists. Twenty-five years across three continents taught me the rest: that culture decides the pace of change, people decide whether it lasts, and judgment matters more than any framework. This is what I learned, and the series I built from it.
The Junior Engineer Was Right. I Overrode Him.
He was one of the youngest people on the team, and he was right. I told him no anyway. Sales had promised the delivery date without consulting us, the contracts were signed, and every path to push it back was closed. This is the story of the shortcut I approved, the debt that came due exactly as he predicted, and the two failures that cost more than the rework itself.
We Paid an Expert to Agree With Us
We hired a respected firm to design an integration layer for our applications. They studied the present perfectly and never asked about the future. The design they steered us toward would have blocked the functionalities that should have been core to our direction. This is the story of why the comfortable recommendation is the one to watch, and what fifteen years as a system engineer taught me about resisting it.
Everyone in the Room Nodded. Nobody Agreed.
The data initiative had been in discussion for months. Then one meeting, IT leadership finally seemed to agree. I walked out believing we had alignment. We had nodding. When the details reached the final stages, every department turned out to hold a different version of what the project was. The project shipped on time, but the people who started it were gone before it went live. This is the story of the false alignment trap and how to force real agreement.
Shared Accountability Is How Nothing Gets Decided
The vendor called it the future. Our CIO believed it. So we set the ambition to migrate to the newest ERP architecture, and then the decision sat unowned for far too long. IT waited on the business. Finance waited on IT. Operations vetoed without offering an alternative. This is the story of a decision nobody would sign, what the delay cost, and the one move that finally broke the deadlock.
My First Big Mistake as a Technology Leader
I joined the transformation late and assumed the stakeholders had been brought along. They had not. Halfway through the build, I was explaining to primary stakeholders why we were building the platform at all, work that should have been done before a single line of code was written. This is the story of that mistake and the lesson I now bring to every transformation.
The Number on the Dashboard Was a Lie
The dashboard was green. Every KPI showed the system performing as it should. And almost nobody in the room trusted a single number on it. This is the story of how a reporting system lost its meaning, why nobody owning the data was the real cause, and what it takes to build dashboards your teams actually believe.
The Vendor Promised Everything. We Bought the Wrong Thing.
The demo was flawless. The capabilities matched our requirements line by line. So we signed. The trouble did not show up in the technology. It showed up in everything around it. This is the story of a SOC solution that taught me why you should never let a vendor lead the decision and what owning the full relationship actually requires.
The Farmer With a Phone: What Remote AI Looks Like When You Get Data Mesh Right
A farmer points his phone at a crop problem and gets a real-time AI diagnosis drawing on soil sensors, satellite imagery, weather data, and five years of yield history simultaneously. The technology exists. What most organizations are missing is the data architecture that makes it possible. This article explains data mesh, federated governance, and why the CIO’s most important AI decision is an ownership decision.
Every CIO Has a Resilience Plan. Almost None Have a Resilience Capability.
71% of organizations do no failover testing. 39% of executives handle outages reactively with no formal protocols. Every CIO has a resilience plan. Almost none have a resilience capability. This article explains the difference and what it takes to close the gap before the next incident makes it visible.
Which Decisions Should You Never Delegate to AI? A Framework for Drawing the Line
The governance question is not how to control AI agents. It is how to classify which decisions they should be making at all. This article gives CIOs, CEOs, and IT leaders a practical three-category framework and a four-criteria matrix to draw the line clearly, before something goes wrong.
Your Bank Has Two Customers. It Can Only Afford One
One in five customers at some Swiss retail banks still does not interact digitally at all. Gen Z customers switch banks three times more often than their parents if digital experience falls short. Most CIOs are serving both groups without a conscious strategy for either. This article gives you a framework to finally make the choice.