Ongoing senior advice
Advisory technology leadershipContinuing senior judgement for an organisation that does not need, or cannot justify, a permanent executive in the role.
Most technology problems are not technology problems.
I'm Agron. I work with leaders when a technology decision has become too important to leave to momentum, to a vendor, or to a project team alone.
Sometimes that means stepping in for a defined period. Sometimes it is a single decision. Often it is the point where AI, data, security and the way the organisation actually runs have become the same problem.
Phogen is where I keep that advisory work, the technical thinking behind it, and the problems that shaped how I make technology decisions.
What brought you here?
One of these is usually closer to the truth than a job title.
You need senior technology judgement, but not another permanent executive.
A fractional or interim role is often the right shape when the problem is important but bounded. You get the judgement without adding headcount you will have to unwind later.
AI is moving faster than your rules, your data or your risk model.
The first job is usually deciding what a system is allowed to know and allowed to do, before anyone chooses a model. Choosing the model first is how organisations end up governing something they have already deployed.
A legacy system or vendor arrangement has become hard to defend.
The real decision is usually replace, contain, renegotiate or retire. It is rarely the word transform, and it is rarely all four systems at once.
Sensitive information needs to become useful without becoming exposed.
Some workloads belong in public cloud and some do not. The architecture should follow the obligation rather than the other way round.
A board or principal needs an independent answer before committing.
A focused assessment can test the architecture, the cost, the dependencies and the claims while the decision is still cheap to reverse.
Ways to work together
Four shapes account for most of the work I do.
Leadership for a defined period
Interim leadership and resetsA defined period covering an executive gap, a modernisation, a stalled programme or an operating-model change, with a stated end.
A second opinion before an important decision
Board and principal adviceAn independent view of what is being proposed, what it will cost, what could go wrong, and what I would do instead. On an AI decision, a cloud move, an outsourcing arrangement, a supplier, or an investment with technology in it.
One clearly bounded problem
Bounded mandatesOne question, one answer, a fixed scope. A technology assessment, a review of whether the organisation is ready for AI, a test of whether recovery actually works, a technology review after an acquisition, or a reset with a deadline on it.
Selected work
Three of the nine.
01
Trust and advisory, regulated financial services
Ninety days to retire an estate of legacy systems
Replacing a fragile collection of ageing systems before a failure made the decision for us.
What was happening
An organisation in the trust and advisory sector was running on systems that had quietly stopped being safe. Documents held with no version history and no record of who changed what. Correspondence sitting on a server the manufacturer no longer supported. Years of scanned paper that could only be found by someone who already knew where it was. And a piece of software that nobody left in the business knew how to rebuild.
Result
Finding a document fell from hours to seconds. A substantial share came off the annual licensing bill, because retiring the old systems retired what they cost to license. Most of the intended users were working in the new systems inside the first month, which is what actually decides whether a migration worked or merely finished. And recovery was not assumed. It was demonstrated, in a ransomware exercise.
02
AI systems, current work
An AI agent is privileged infrastructure
When AI can read company information and take action, its access deserves the same scrutiny as a powerful employee account.
What was happening
Organisations were connecting AI systems to their own documents, their own tools and, increasingly, to the ability to do things rather than only answer questions. The connection is usually made by whoever is closest to the problem, quickly, and to be helpful.
Result
Security, identity and AI governance stop being three departments with three budgets and three different answers. Settled in advance, this is an afternoon's conversation. Settled afterwards, it is an incident.
04
Supervised machine learning, consumer services marketplace
A price without the site visit
Everyone in the marketplace was waiting on the same thing: somebody driving out to measure the job.
What was happening
Quoting this kind of work meant sending somebody out to look at it first. The homeowner waited days for a number. The trade firm wrote offers by hand, and most of those offers never became work.
Result
Roughly a fifth came off what evaluating a job cost the customer. Offers could be issued immediately rather than after days of exchange, taking close to a fifth off the time spent producing them. Both approaches were filed for patent consideration.
How I think about technology
Five positions, held long enough to be sure of them.
Start with the decision, not the product.
The question is almost never which tool. It is what the organisation is trying to be able to do, and what it will have to live with afterwards.
Make important information easier to reach, not merely easier to store.
Storage has been solved for years. Finding the right answer quickly, and knowing it is the right one, has not.
Give systems only the authority they need.
That has always been true of people's accounts. It became urgent the moment software started acting on its own.
Keep a way out when a supplier becomes structural.
Dependence is not a problem until it is the only option. By then it is expensive to discover.
Test recovery instead of assuming it.
Recovery that has never been tested is a theory. Most organisations own a document describing one.
Point of view
The safest AI system is not the one that does the least. It is the one whose authority somebody has actually decided on. There are six steps between a system that can only read and a system that can act on its own, and each one costs something different.
See how much authority an AI system is being given9Problems written up here
15Published pieces
6Questions I ask before trusting an AI system
Some things are deliberately absent.
You will not find client logos here, or a list of named organisations. Much of my work sits inside places where discretion is part of what they sell. I describe the problem, the reasoning and the outcome, and I leave the organisation out of it.
Background
The layers that now have to be understood together, I have run each of them: networks and infrastructure, security and risk, data science, delivery and platforms, product, and the executive layer where the question becomes which of them deserves the money.
That is why a board conversation and the architecture underneath it are the same conversation rather than two. University research, international development programmes, enterprise software, regulated financial services, and two things being built now.
More about how I got here
What happens next
Three steps, and you can stop after any of them.
You do not need to decide in advance what kind of help this is. Describe the situation and the shape usually becomes obvious to both of us.
- 1
A private conversation
A short description of the situation is enough to start. No preparation, no document, no procurement process. If it is not something I am the right person for, I will say so and point you at who is.
- 2
An independent read of the situation
I look at what is actually true rather than what the last report said: the decision in front of you, what it depends on, what it will cost to reverse, and where the real risk sits. This is deliberately short.
- 3
A written scope, or a straight answer that none is needed
If there is work worth doing, you get it in writing: what it covers, how long, what you receive and what it costs. Sometimes the honest answer is that the problem does not need an adviser, and that is a perfectly good outcome.
Nothing about the first two steps commits you to the third.
If you are dealing with something difficult, start with the problem.
You do not need to know whether it is an advisory engagement, an interim role or a one-off assessment. A short description of the situation is enough.