In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, a robust digital strategy has become a critical component for business success. This importance is underscored by both commercial and operational imperatives. From a commercial perspective, a well-defined software and IT strategy enables organisations to harness digital transformation initiatives, drive innovation, and create competitive differentiation. By leveraging advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and data analytics, companies can unlock new revenue streams, enhance customer experiences, and optimise product offerings to meet the ever-changing demands of the market.
On the operational side, an effective software and IT strategy ensures the seamless integration of technology across all facets of the business, thereby enhancing efficiency, reducing costs, and improving agility. It facilitates streamlined processes, improves decision-making through real-time data insights, and supports scalable growth by providing a flexible technological foundation. Additionally, as cybersecurity threats continue to rise, a well-structured IT strategy is vital to safeguarding digital assets, ensuring business continuity and resilience.
In essence, the convergence of commercial and operational benefits makes software and IT strategy not merely a technical consideration, but a fundamental driver of business value and sustainability in the digital era. Organisations that prioritise and invest in a strategic IT roadmap are better positioned to navigate complexities, seize opportunities, and achieve long-term success.
In my role, I define and implement digital strategies for business growth and optimisation.
Here’s some of my recent blog posts
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Are the Newest AI Models Changing the Consumer Landscape?
The newest models are better, but the bigger change for consumers is that Meta, OpenAI and Anthropic now sell agents that keep working after you close the app. The question is no longer what they can answer, but what they can be trusted to do. In the space of six weeks, three of the largest…
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Where Should the Agent Stop? Designing the Handoff in Agentic Airline Retail
In the first fortnight of October, four airline-industry stories appeared that look unrelated and are not. Southwest Airlines launched a plugin that lets travellers search and compare its flights inside ChatGPT, but sends them to its own website to pay. The chief AI scientist of British Airways’ parent group described the three questions it asks…
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Should the AI safety panic change your adoption plan?
The people building the world’s most capable AI models spent the weekend arguing that progress at the frontier needs to be slowed down. Markets reacted. The White House called the concern a hoax. Congress started debating what intervention might look like. It has inevitably prompted a question from enterprise leaders: does this mean we should…
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Stop Measuring AI Adoption, Start Measuring AI Outcomes
There is a slide appearing in board packs across large enterprises at the moment. It shows how many employees have an AI licence, weekly active users, perhaps token consumption and a reassuring trend line heading upwards. It looks like evidence of progress. The problem is that it tells you very little about whether AI is…
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What Is My Moat, and Will It Protect Me From Disintermediation?
The question travel keeps asking has the threat wrong. Your moat will very probably survive disintermediation – which is the wrong reassurance. What it must survive is the new layer settling above you, and the customer who never comes back. The question that ran through Phocuswright Europe this year, in almost every room I sat…
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Why Is AI Trusted for Planning, but Not for Booking?
If there is one thing the evidence on artificial intelligence in travel agrees on, it is where the technology has actually landed. Almost all of the AI that travellers use sits in the planning of a trip, in the dreaming and the shaping and the shortlisting, and almost none of it sits in the booking.…
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Prompt Injection Is Not SQL Injection, and the Difference Is Strategic
Why the most reassuring comparison in AI security is also the most dangerous one, and what boards should do about it The comfort of a familiar name When Simon Willison coined the term “prompt injection” in September 2022, he named it deliberately after SQL injection, because the underlying pathology looked identical: trusted instructions and untrusted…
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What to Do When Your Staff Already Use AI You Never Approved
The question is wrong before anyone answers it Most organisations arrive at shadow AI in the accusatory mood. Somebody in finance has been feeding a draft forecast into a consumer chatbot; somebody in legal has been summarising contracts through a free browser extension; and the instinctive framing is one of transgression. Who did this, how…
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Is a Private AI the Answer to Controlling Token Usage in Your SME?
For most small and medium-sized enterprises, the first year of serious artificial intelligence adoption follows a predictable arc. The pilot is cheap, the enthusiasm is high, and then the invoice arrives. Somewhere between the proof of concept and the production rollout, a line item that once read a few hundred pounds a month begins to…
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When AI and Data Lakes Become Commodities, What Exactly Is your Marketing CRM Add-on giving You?
A strategic examination of whether enterprise marketing CRM add-ons still justify their price, a step-by-step blueprint for building hyper-personalisation on Amazon’s serverless data lake and Bedrock, and an honest account of the moment at which Snowflake becomes the more sensible substrate. The commoditisation thesis For the better part of a decade, the enterprise marketing cloud…
