How a paper is produced
The questions come from practice — problems met in long-lived institutional systems that have no useful name or operating model yet. Cases are composite and anonymised; no client's or employer's material is used, and nothing that could identify an engagement appears in a paper. Before drafting I search for prior art, because a paper that restates existing work is not worth a reader's time, and a thing that already has a name does not need another. Each finished paper is deposited with Zenodo and carries a DOI, so it has a permanent citable record independent of this site. Corrections are published as new versions rather than edited in place: the earlier version stays retrievable, and what changed is visible in the record.
Where AI is used, and where it is not
A practice that writes about AI governance should be willing to state its own use of it.
| AI Assisted | Literature and prior-art search; drafting and restructuring prose; code and build work in the site repositories; formatting and consistency checks; challenge and counter-argument against a draft |
| Not delegated | The argument and the claims made; every factual assertion, verified against a primary source before publication; the decision to publish; correspondence and client-facing communication |
I am accountable for every published claim, however the text carrying it was produced. No client, employer or confidential material is placed into any AI tool. AI assistance does not confer authorship — the papers are single-authored, and I answer for them.
How advisory work is delivered
Advisory work is fixed scope, document-led and asynchronous, with no sustained on-site presence. That is a constraint, and it is also the discipline: a scope that has to be written down before it starts is a scope that can be argued with, and a finding that has to survive on the page cannot rest on the room it was presented in.
A written assessment states its findings, the evidence behind each one, a risk rating, and a prioritised remediation sequence the client can act on without me. A briefing is one prepared session built against the client's own estate, rather than a general presentation. Engagements that need a standing team are referred on rather than taken.
What an independent architecture review contains
Nothing below is an extract from client work; actual reports are confidential.
A review is a document, not a presentation, and it is written so it can be argued with after the room has emptied. These are its sections, in order.
- Scope and questions asked — the specific questions the review was commissioned to answer, stated before any finding, so the report can be held to them.
- What was examined — systems, documents, interviews and data actually inspected, with dates. A reader can then judge what the conclusions rest on.
- Findings — each one stated as a claim, with the evidence behind it and a confidence statement saying how strongly the evidence supports it.
- Risks — rated, with the rating basis stated. A rating whose method is not written down cannot be challenged, and so cannot be trusted.
- Options with trade-offs — the realistic courses of action, each with what it costs and what it gives up, not a single preferred answer dressed as the only one.
- Recommendation — one clear course of action, with dissent recorded where the author disagrees with the prevailing internal view, and the reasoning for the disagreement given.
- What was out of scope, and why — the boundary of the work, so a later reader does not mistake silence for a clean bill of health.
Advisory work is carried out through Robotiqa Technologies Ltd. — robotiqa.com/advisory