Pillar
Business framing, AI strategy, competitive positioning
29 articles • Page 3 of 4
A recommendation that assumes specific infrastructure is available everywhere may not survive contact with the actual operating environment. Hardware constraints are real, common, and routinely ignored during software evaluation.
Most technology problems are symptoms. Slow reporting might be a data governance issue, an analytics architecture gap, or a process failure that predates any software. Solving the symptom with a new tool means the problem moves — it doesn't disappear.
License cost is the smallest line item. Implementation, integration work, training, ongoing maintenance, and the staff hours required to operate at scale typically run two to five times the sticker price.
Recommending infrastructure that requires dedicated engineering to maintain — to a team with none — isn't a recommendation. It's a liability with a polished interface. The gap between capability and operability is where implementations die.
The average mid-market company runs 187 SaaS applications. Every new tool has to connect to the ones already there — and the most capable platform in a category is often the worst fit for a specific stack.
Evaluate vendor demos beyond the surface against your stack before the slides. CISA and FBI Secure by Demand (6 Aug 2024): SBOM, patches, CVE records. A demo that cannot run on your constraints is a movie.
Seventy percent of technology transformations fail to meet their stated objectives. The failure is rarely the technology itself — it's the gap between what was recommended and what the organization was actually equipped to operate.
A tool designed for one deployment model behaves differently in another. Where your infrastructure lives isn't a preference — it's a constraint that eliminates options before evaluation even starts.
Production AI has reliability, auditability, and hallucination characteristics that the marketing copy doesn't cover. What to actually evaluate before deploying AI in a regulated environment.
