Tag Archives: systems thinking

Data Is a Symptom of Function: Migrating RDBMS Estates Is Not Transformation

Migrating legacy RDBMS estates to the cloud is often framed as a transformation, but relocating data rarely modernises systems. Data is a symptom of underlying business function, encoded behaviour, and dense integration. Without upstream redesign (defining capabilities, decomposing behaviour, clarifying boundaries, and extracting embedded logic) cloud migration preserves complexity, creating “re-legacy” at scale rather than true modernisation.

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Can’t Understand Neurodivergent Thinking

Using the February 2026 BAFTA controversy involving Tourette’s activist John Davidson as a cultural flashpoint, this essay examines why neurodivergent people are instinctively rejected. Blending research, lived experience, and sector insight, it argues that discomfort with autistic cognition is not merely institutional but biological and tribal. Instinct, however, is not justification. Inclusion requires discipline, not sentiment. Tolerance must extend beyond what feels comfortable.

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Ideas Over Keystrokes

“Ideas Over Keystrokes” argues that the value of writing lies in thinking, synthesis, and intellectual leverage: not in the manual act of typing. AI is framed as a drafting tool that accelerates iteration and removes friction, not a substitute for judgment or expertise. I’m not Jack Kerouac; I’m building arguments, not mythology, and this isn’t beat poetry. The piece reframes authorship in terms of cognitive depth and usefulness rather than artisanal labour.

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C# and the Theology of Enterprise Suffering

C# and Azure aren’t just tools; they’re institutional gravity wells. This essay examines how enterprise procurement psychology, stack complexity, and economic capture patterns shape developer culture, delivery speed, and technical decision-making. The question isn’t whether C# works. It’s whether it optimises for craft or for compliance.

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What Does It Take to Deliver? A Terrible Will

“Rise” by Public Image Ltd is not a song about hope or release. It is a manual for forward motion under pressure. Angular, repetitive, and unrelenting, it treats anger as usable energy rather than emotion. This track pairs with work done without validation, when opposition provides structure and refusal becomes propulsion.

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What It Means To Be A Business/Technology Architect In A Post Agile, Post AI World

What does it mean to be an architect in a post-agile, post-AI enterprise? This article explores architecture as sense-making, navigation, and organisational memory rather than artefact production. It examines the evolving role of domain and enterprise architects, the value they bring to fast-moving change programmes, and how good architecture enables speed without fragility by preserving coherence, optionality, and shared understanding over time.

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When Everyone’s an Expert: What AI Can Learn from the Personal Trainer Industry

As AI adoption accelerates, expertise is increasingly “performed” rather than earned. By comparing AI’s current hype cycle with the long-standing lack of regulation in the personal trainer industry, this piece examines how unregulated expertise markets reward confidence over competence, normalise harm, and erode trust. The issue isn’t regulation for its own sake; it’s accountability before failure becomes infrastructure.

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The Work Speaks for Itself

This article explains why I am stepping back from writing about neurodiversity as a primary lens for my work. Not because the subject no longer matters, but because over time it has begun to obscure achievement rather than illuminate it. This is a reflection on explanation, authority, and the point at which context stops being helpful and starts getting in the way.

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Systems in Tension: Britain’s China Crisis Spy Farce and the Architecture of Denial

A forensic if mordant look at how the “Chinese spies in Parliament” case collapsed.  I don’t think it was lies, more a system that’s eating itself. Legal, political, and economic silos each told their own version of the truth until coherence disappeared into the vortex. Between Cummings’ claims, Martin’s rebuttals, the embassy standoff, and Kemi Badenoch’s attack on Starmer, it’s a living portrait of Britain’s institutions locked in tension. Prosperity versus protection; diplomacy versus denial. But it doesn’t mean the system is broken; it might be working exactly as intended. Get the money in at all costs?

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The Virtuous Triangle: Rethinking Risk at Scale

This article introduces the Virtuous Triangle as a strategic framework for understanding cyber risk through the combined lenses of vulnerability assessment, threat intelligence, and contextual risk analysis. It argues that meaningful risk assessment only emerges when these components are integrated and automated at scale. Drawing on decades of experience, the piece reflects on the limitations of standalone data and the necessity of systems thinking in cybersecurity.

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