ARTICLES · DUE DILIGENCE, ON US
Read the guides before you commit.
Decision guides and engineering notes on choosing, scoping, building and running AI systems that keep working in daily operations, long after launch.
- Read guides to choosing and building useful AI systems.
- Explore the engineering work behind reliable operation.
- Test a proposal before you commit budget or people to it.
Strategy
You Are Approving A Build Nobody Has Checked
The proposal has a number, a timeline and a team who believe in it. Most AI projects are lost in that room, because nobody independent has checked the decision it changes, the data it runs on, or the systems it must plug into.
Nobody Wrote Down What Success Would Look Like
You approved a project to fix a workflow, and months later nobody in the room can say whether it worked. That is a writing failure, not a technology failure: nothing in the specification could be graded pass or fail by an outsider.
It Went Live And The Savings Never Arrived
The system works and the return still has not shown up in your numbers. Every dollar is committed before launch and every dollar of return is earned after it, once the project budget has closed and nobody owns the system.
The Status Meeting Exists Because Nothing Reports Itself
Can you see how many items a process holds, how long the oldest has waited and where it is stuck, without asking someone? Connect documents to an operational record so progress and exceptions stay visible as work moves.
Four Weeks Day By Day Including What Goes Wrong
A four-week date for a first release is easy to write and hard to believe. It becomes believable when you see the shape of the weeks: what exists at the end of each one, and what happens to the date when something breaks.
The Process That Was Too Small To Fix
For years your broken reconciliation was too small to justify a project. The cost of a small, well-specified piece of software has fallen far enough that the answer has expired, and a whole class of that work is now worth doing.
The Work Your ERP Was Never Built To Do
The enterprise system covers the standard eighty percent. The delay, the cost and the eventual control finding sit in the twenty percent around it, now run on a spreadsheet and a weekly meeting. Build around it, not instead of it.
Three Tests A Vendor Must Pass Before Signing
A proposal that reads well tells you nothing about whether the work will hold up in your environment, because a document cannot fail. Three tests separate a vendor who can do the work from one who can only describe it.
Why Healthcare AI Fails At The Hospital Connection
Healthcare AI products stall at the connection to hospital systems, not at the model. FHIR fixes the shape of the data and decides almost nothing about the workflow or the auth surface. Here is what EHR and FHIR work requires.
The Program Has A Budget And No Builder
An approved transformation program has a sponsor, a steering committee and readouts, and none of them builds anything. When its recommendations need software, identify that work and make someone responsible for it.