Ongoing senior advice
Advisory technology leadershipContinuing senior judgement for an organisation that does not need, or cannot justify, a permanent executive in the role.
Everyone wants you to move faster. You are the one who has to live with the decision.
Technology and AI decisions are getting larger, arriving faster, and becoming harder to reverse. The vendor has an answer. Your own team has an answer. The board wants progress. What is usually missing is an independent read of what is actually worth doing, what can wait, and what the organisation is genuinely ready for.
I'm Agron. I work with leaders when an important technology decision needs more than another opinion.
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.
AI is already moving through the organisation. The question is whether anyone has decided where it should stop.
There are licences, experiments, people using tools nobody approved, and a vendor with a proposal. What is often missing is a decision about what a system may see, what it may recommend, and what it may carry out on its own. That decision is cheap to make now and expensive to retrofit.
Everyone has a recommendation. You still have to decide.
The supplier is selling. The internal team has a preference and a reason for it. The consultancy has a programme. Each of them is partly right, and none of them signs the approval or lives with it afterwards.
Technology costs compound quietly. So do the decisions underneath them.
Cloud, licences, AI consumption, managed services, the integration nobody planned for. The spend is precise and easy to find. The return is usually a story somebody tells. The useful question is which part of the cost is genuinely unavoidable.
It works. Nobody is entirely comfortable explaining why.
An arrangement that has never failed can still be a liability: an unsupported system, a supplier who became structural, a workflow that lives in one person's memory. The risk stays invisible until the day it is not.
The organisation may already be using technology you have not decided to trust.
Confidential material moves into tools that were never approved, usually by capable people trying to do their jobs well. In a practice where confidentiality is the product, that is a professional exposure before it is a technical one.
You do not need to become the technologist. You need enough clarity to decide.
Some decisions are too consequential to delegate and too technical to judge from a board paper. The job is to make the trade-offs legible, not to turn the board into engineers.
Why these decisions are hard
Advice is abundant. Accountability is not.
A technology decision of any size now arrives with several confident answers already attached to it. The supplier has one. The internal team has one, and usually a good reason for it. The consultancy has a programme. The security specialist wants more controls. They can all be partly right at the same time.
None of them approves the spend, explains it to the board, or runs the organisation that has to live inside the result. That part does not distribute.
What is usually missing is not another opinion. It is someone senior who is not selling the answer.
I have worked on these decisions from several sides of the table: infrastructure, security, data, product, AI, operations and executive leadership. That matters because the difficult ones rarely stay inside one of those boxes. A cost problem turns out to be an architecture problem. An AI problem turns out to be a question about who owns the data. Specialist advice is usually correct and usually incomplete.
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. A patent lawyer reviewed both methods and judged them novel enough to be worth protecting.
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 before a supplier becomes too deeply embedded in the business.
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.
The useful time for an independent view is before the decision becomes difficult to reverse.
Two or three lines are enough: what is happening, what decision is coming, and when it matters. You do not need to know which kind of engagement this is. LinkedIn is the single route in, on purpose.