Are you wasting time and money by following the IT herd?

Most businesses use the same systems as everyone else from a few big suppliers: Email on Gmail or similar, office apps on Google Drive or Office 365, a CRM from Salesforce, a website on Wordpress. Systems hosted on AWS or Google Cloud. Video conferencing through Zoom or MS Teams. What could you gain from doing things differently? Are you missing an opportunity to get a competitive edge with better systems?

There are other ways of doing things. You can have your own systems, more cheaply than you think. You are not lead by complex and unpredictable pricing into paying for each feature and each user separately. Most of all, you can customise and integrate them. You can have completely custom solutions that exactly fit your needs and workflow.

I do all this myself, in my own business. If you want to talk to me, I will send you a link to a meeting on my video conferencing server. If you email me on my main email address, it will go to my email server. I track my time with software I wrote myself.

I advise others, and develop systems that deliver exactly what my customers need. I offer the opposite of a one size fits all solution.

I am a pragmatist and business needs will always trump philosophy. I sometimes tell people they should run their website on Wordpress (I even still have one Wordpress site myself), and some of my domains' email is run on servers other than mine. I strive to avoid reinventing the wheel if the right solution already exists.

Who I am

I am an experienced programmer who has enough expertise in business and finance to be cited in books and academic journals.

My previous career required not just financial analysis, but spending a lot of time talking to people who ran big business (such as FTSE 350 companies), asking the right questions, and understanding a variety of businesses.

That is why I have something unusual to offer, that combination of skills to figure out how to make technology work for your business.

Experience

• Over a decade of programming experience
• Author of Moneyterms which is frequently cited in academic journals
• Business designer (a client facing role dealing with everything from requirements to acceptance testing) at what is now LSEG Technology
• Analyst at a stockbroker and then a fund manager, in Asia and the UK
• Analyst at a now defunct investment dotcom, where I was also the liaison between my department and the developers

Qualifications

• MSc in Finance
• MBA

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