Why does OneTen exist?
Because in most of the rooms where technology gets decided, nobody is being paid to ask whether the decision is right for the business. Everyone in the room has a stake in the answer, and none of those stakes are yours.
This is the traditional point in a launch post where I tell you about my journey. I will keep it brief, because you did not come here for that, and because the honest version is short.
Twenty years in the room
I have spent twenty years designing and delivering technology across enterprise, the public sector and universities. Different sectors, different budgets, remarkably consistent failure mode.
It was almost never incompetence. The people were good and the intentions were fine. What went wrong was structural: the organisation had no independent voice, so the loudest technically credible person in the room won, and that person was usually selling something.
I watched a migration get scoped around a partner’s certification rather than the workload. I watched a platform chosen because it made the incumbent supplier’s renewal easier to justify. I watched a business commit to three years of licensing on the strength of a diagram nobody could subsequently find. None of that was fraud. It was just what happens when the only expertise in the room is on someone else’s payroll.
A brief and affectionate tour of the theatre
Enterprise technology has developed an elaborate set of rituals whose purpose is to make it look as though this problem has been solved.
There is the deck, which grows a slide every time anyone asks a difficult question. There is the discovery workshop, six weeks in which your own staff explain your business back to you at considerable expense. There is the strategy document, two hundred pages, one confirmed reader, a section on culture. There is the RAG status, which stays amber for eleven months and turns red the week before go-live.
And there is the partner: charming, genuinely knowledgeable, present at the pitch and at the post-mortem, absent in between, during which a delivery team you did not interview builds something to a standard nobody wrote down.
I want to be fair here. Every one of those rituals began as a reasonable idea. Discovery matters. Documentation matters. The problem is that the ritual survived and the purpose did not, and you are still paying for both.
What I concluded
Two things, and they took an embarrassingly long time.
The first is that the useful part of my job was never the knowledge. It was being the person in the room with no reason to prefer one answer. That is a structural position, not a skill, and any business can have it if it decides to pay for it directly rather than hoping to get it free from a supplier.
The second is that almost everything that went wrong was traceable to something nobody had written down. Not a missing framework. A missing sentence: what this has to do, what it must not cost, who decides, how we will know it worked. Organisations with those sentences written down made decent decisions with mediocre process. Organisations without them made poor decisions with immaculate process.
What changed, and why I could not have done this in 2015
I could have told you all of the above ten years ago. What I could not have done is deliver on it, because the judgement is maybe a fifth of the work and the other four fifths is volume: the configuration, the documentation, the tests, the evidence, the tedium.
That is the part AI is genuinely, unglamorously good at. And it is good at it precisely because of the second conclusion above. An assistant with your standards written down where it can read them produces work that fits your organisation. One without them produces something plausible and slightly wrong, which is the most expensive category of output there is.
So the standards are not paperwork any more. They are the thing that makes the automation safe. That was a very satisfying discovery for someone who had spent two decades being the person asking for them.
What that means you can buy
Four things, described the way I would describe them to you rather than the way they appear on a rate card.
- A seat at the table, monthly. I review what your vendors propose, challenge it, and leave behind a written process your own team can run. Independent, because I sell nothing else.
- A foundation, fixed fee. I interview your team, set out the options with the trade-offs in plain language, and hand over a working, compliant starting point your engineers own.
- A website that is genuinely finished. Built properly, hosted on my own EU infrastructure, from twenty-five euros a month. Pypers Homes and Trivino Marketing both run on it, each with its own isolated content system.
- Specialist work, when it is actually specialist. Migrations, cloud cost, security and compliance architecture. Scoped to the problem and ended when it is solved.
What I will not sell you
No software resale, no referral fees, no partnerships that quietly shape the advice. No two-hundred-page document. No discovery workshop that exists to establish what you told me in the first meeting. No account manager, because there is nobody here to hide behind.
And no promise that AI makes this cheap and effortless. It makes it faster and more consistent, which is a real and valuable thing, and it also means the work needs better standards and tighter checks than it did before. Anyone telling you otherwise is selling licences.
If any of that sounded familiar
The businesses I help usually are not in trouble. They are doing fine and quietly aware that several significant technology decisions were made by whoever happened to be in the room, and that nobody could now explain why.
That is a very fixable position, and the fix starts with a conversation rather than a proposal.
Book thirty minutes. No deck. I promise.