Global OneInternational
Advisory and delivery across infrastructure, systems and connectivity.
The gap
Two things determine whether it works.
Knowing what you have, and knowing what to buy. Most organisations are strong at neither, and the market is arranged to keep it that way.
Arranged, because both kinds of help are compromised.
Vendors know what the technology costs, but not what you can carry. Consultants know the theory, but have never run one. Between them sits a gap almost nobody occupies.
And it opens at the worst moment.
When something large is being scoped, costed and awarded. Someone with an interest in the answer, or someone with no experience of the consequences. Neither is dishonest. Neither can tell you the whole truth.
So when it fails, it is rarely for the reason expected.
Rarely because the technology was bad. Usually because it was never sized for who bought it, on assumptions nobody checked.
Which leaves a third option. Someone who has run it, and isn't selling it.
What we do
Five actions, in the order an engagement moves.
The subject changes with the client. The sequence does not.
A business case needs testing before capital is committed. A technical proposal arrives that nobody inside the organisation has the standing to challenge — the vendor wrote it, and the people qualified to argue with it work for the vendor. A strategy needs translating into what it will actually demand of the teams and systems expected to deliver it.
Whether what is being sold is what is being described is not answered in the data room. It is answered in a warehouse, a depot, a substation yard. We establish what is true, then test the reporting against it. Most of what we find was never hidden — it simply passed through too many hands on the way up.
Requirements, target architecture, evaluation criteria, tender management. A government department procuring something it will live with for fifteen years. We would rather define nothing than define it around what we happen to carry, and we say so plainly when the market has nothing sized for them.
Vendor selection against the specification, negotiation, and the commercial structuring behind it. Much of this exists because the large vendors will not tailor for organisations of this size — so the work is finding who will, and on what terms.
Programme management across multiple vendors, contractor governance, acceptance and handover. Whoever builds it, someone has to hold the seams between them — the interfaces, the sequence, the moment when each party says the other was responsible. That is the work.
What we cover
We do not carry a catalogue.
The right answer changes with the client. These are the domains we assess, specify and advise on.