What the firm's research tried, what it showed, and what it changed: positions, papers and running programs, published as the work lands and gathered into an issue each quarter.
We've been creating for a while: patents filed since 2002, marks in use since 1998, papers in journals since 2022, essays since 2022, posts since 2024. Our clients include the U.S. Federal Government and their Prime Contractors, Fortune 500, non-profits and many others.
What the firm's works found, made or proved this quarter. The issue is frozen at the quarter's end.
Vol. 1 · No. 4 · Autumn 2026Working paper
This paper argues that AI-prepared dashboards and digests add information faster than people can act on it, and proposes a Decisions & NBA Board: a short queue of decisions, each with cited evidence, options, an owner with authority and a dated check on the result. It matters because a report that changes no decision is a cost. No hypothesis has been tested.
Working paper
This paper proposes a field-testable operating model for CTOs: one traceable evidence base that executive peers can inspect for their own jobs without relying on the CTO's persuasion. It matters because senior leaders often judge engineering by remembered incidents and impressions. The six hypotheses have not been tested.
Working paper
This paper proposes Olive Button, a Blue Button-style FHIR implementation pattern for DD214 service data that helps meet the 30-, 120-, and 180-day mandates of Executive Order 14426 using existing systems and standards. It matters because the order now requires records sharing at separation. The FHIR mapping is an implementation hypothesis, and the order does not mandate FHIR.
One section per research area: the programs running in it, the papers that settled a question, and the positions we hold.
Program
Native Alpha™ is the unusual capability of a person or organisation that materially changes an accepted outcome, and that ordinary peers with ordinary tools and AI cannot reproduce. Recomposition is dividing work again so that capability is spent where it matters. The goal is a working operation in which people, machines, software, and outside services each carry the work they can perform well and lawfully.
Program
We hand capable engines important work and then hand them a thin description of the people, companies, customers, competitors, products, and systems the work is about. An Eidolon is a working digital reflection of one of those things: not a replica, not a clone, but enough grounded reality for an AI to reason about the original without guessing.
Program
Labor as Code™ is the practice of writing a unit of work down (its purpose, evidence, authority, limits, exceptions, and tests) precisely enough that it can be assigned to a person or a machine and then inspected and changed. Work becomes governable when its purpose, evidence, authority, limits, exceptions, and tests are written clearly enough to inspect and change.
Program
This pillar asks how an organization can know that its mixed workforce acts on reliable evidence and produces acceptable outcomes. Consequential work needs evidence of what happened, clear limits on authority, known failure modes, and a test tied to the result in the world. It matters because a completed field can be well formed and still be wrong.
Program
A job title bundles work, authority, trust, evidence, and liability. Open the bundle before deciding what should move and what must stay with a person.
Program
AI makes some attacks cheaper and gives defenders more ways to watch systems continuously. This pillar asks which neglected defensive jobs machines can now do, and which decisions still need a person.
Program
Engineering disciplines specify an outcome, instrument the system, attack the assumption, measure what happens, and improve. This pillar applies that sequence to cyber resilience and collects the evidence needed before any composite score can honestly be defined.
Program
Compliant Insecurity is the condition of an organisation that holds every certificate its market asks for and still cannot detect, contain, or recover from an ordinary intrusion. This pillar studies how regulatory and contractual obligations move from periodic attestation to continuous operational evidence.
Program
Governance, risk, and compliance teams write policies, maintain spreadsheets, collect screenshots, and answer questionnaires. This pillar asks how much of that evidence the systems themselves can produce.
Program
A large part of security practice asks employees to remember instructions and behave correctly under time pressure. This pillar studies what happens when that expectation is replaced with technical arrangements that make the safe action the default.
Program
Prevention attracts budget and attention. Recovery is usually delegated to infrastructure, measured by job success, and rehearsed rarely. This pillar studies whether recovery capability is systematically underinvested relative to its effect on total loss.
Program
Most privacy programs are documentary. Notices, consent language, contractual clauses, and a data inventory maintained by interview. This pillar studies privacy as an engineered property of running systems, where the claim in the notice can be checked against the behaviour of the data.
Program
Security programs are usually described by what they have: purchased tools, signed policies, closed findings, and certificates. That says almost nothing about what would happen if a capable attacker tried something today. This pillar tests the controls and measures what happens.
Program
Other organisations hold much of a company's security in their hands: managed providers, cloud platforms, software vendors, clinical systems, contractors, open-source maintainers, and AI providers. This pillar asks what those parties actually do when trouble starts.
Program
This pillar treats care delivery as the product. Drugs, devices, diagnostics, software, monitoring, AI, and human judgment are components of a care pathway that is specified, tested, owned, and improved against a patient outcome. It matters because value may move toward access, authority, workflow control, and measured outcomes as technical components become easier to produce.
Program
Zero Neo says new software should be the last resort when you already own the platform. The same question applies to hardware. Consumer electronics has already commoditized most of the sensing, compute, radio, and power a large class of medical devices needs. If that is true, and if AI-native methods can compress the regulatory and quality work, then some reimbursed devices are priced as though neither change happened.
Program
This pillar sets out the evidence, economics, rights, and decision rules that make a care model worth pursuing and safe to sustain. A care model can advance only when its scientific, market, adoption, economic, and strategic claims survive separate review, because strength in one track cannot erase a fatal weakness in another.
Program
Healthcare is unusually intermediated. Between an innovation and the patient sit physicians, hospitals, distributors, DME suppliers, pharmacies, PBMs, payers, employers, purchasing organizations and government programs, and each of them controls a different part of the money, the workflow, the risk or the door. This pillar treats that structure as something to be mapped and redesigned rather than accepted.
Program
A useful intervention moves through the health system and stays in routine use only when the conditions around it change. Useful interventions stall when patients cannot be found, clinicians cannot act, institutions cannot absorb the change, or payment and accountability remain unsettled. The least ready essential condition can hold the whole path back.
Program
This pillar shows how public records can expose spending, unmet need, scientific movement, delivery capacity, policy experiments, regulated products, and the gaps between them. It asks which public signals can support a timely decision without claiming that incomplete data proves more than it does. Public data should guide investigation, not decorate a market-size claim.
Program
A regulated technology business may find that its next competitor is not another vendor but the practice it has been selling to, rebuilt around AI as an operating company.
Program
A therapy, device, or diagnostic succeeds only when the patient, care team, and delivery setting are ready to carry its clinical capability into a reliable result.
Program
The dashboard is an artifact of software that could not reason. When a system can rank, explain and justify, the correct interface is a briefing, a ranked stream of judgment calls and a conversational explorer, not KPI tiles, module sidebars and worklists. The briefing, the ranked stream and the explorer replace the dashboard, and giving one up has a cost that can be counted.
Program
I study one claim: AI can now assemble the dashboard and the digest people used to build by hand, which adds information faster than people can decide. It helps only if it changes what people decide, start, stop or measure. This pillar asks whether a Decisions & NBA Board does better: a short queue of decisions with evidence, options, an owner and a check on the result. I have written the concept, a draft specification (0056-decisions-nba-board) and a milestone paper with eight hypotheses and a 30-day protocol. I have not run it in a live organization.
This paper argues that AI-prepared dashboards and digests add information faster than people can act on it, and proposes a Decisions & NBA Board: a short queue of decisions, each with cited evidence, options, an owner with authority and a dated check on the result. It matters because a report that changes no decision is a cost. No hypothesis has been tested.
Program
This pillar shows how to begin patent strategy with the result a customer values rather than the thing the inventor built. It then looks for the unusual insight and the constraint a capable competitor cannot avoid without weakening that result. It matters because the commercially important boundary sits where avoiding the patent raises cost, delay, or risk the customer notices.
Program
This pillar shows how to move from a product to the rights that protect it. Break the product into the assets that create value, then use the narrowest controls that can do a real commercial job, whether patent, secret, contract, data right, publication, or mark. It matters because a first product can disappear while the underlying principle stays useful.
Program
This pillar asks which parts of an advantage remain scarce when capable models and competent software are widely available. Assume intelligence, research, and engineering keep getting cheaper, and protect the parts of an advantage that remain scarce under that assumption. It matters because today's implementation difficulty should not be mistaken for a durable advantage.
Program
This pillar shows how to read an existing patent backward to recover the unusual insight, current use, product opportunity, and decision the right can still change. Its test is what commercial choice becomes better because the right exists. It matters because a promising theme does not cure an unclear chain of title or an expired right.
Program
Government should keep every acquisition function that requires public authority and test different ways to perform the commercial support work underneath it. This is not privatization. It is a way to find out what works.
Program
Training is treated as a broadcast: publish the course, record the completion, hope for the change. We treat human knowledge as a control loop instead, where every step from delivery to outcome produces evidence and the evidence decides what the person gets next.
Program
AI matters most where it makes useful work economical for the first time. Past the faster versions of familiar jobs lies work, and products, services and organizational capabilities, that humans could not afford to perform continuously before.
Program
Zero Neo is a research program on one position: a small or midsize business should buy no new software for an operation when the platforms it already owns, its systems of record, and AI already do the job. New software for business operations should be the last resort if Microsoft 365 or Google platforms are already good enough. Zero Neo is the program that tests whether AI has made that position defensible, and looks for the places where it is wrong.
This paper proposes a field-testable operating model for CTOs: one traceable evidence base that executive peers can inspect for their own jobs without relying on the CTO's persuasion. It matters because senior leaders often judge engineering by remembered incidents and impressions. The six hypotheses have not been tested.
This paper proposes Olive Button, a Blue Button-style FHIR implementation pattern for DD214 service data that helps meet the 30-, 120-, and 180-day mandates of Executive Order 14426 using existing systems and standards. It matters because the order now requires records sharing at separation. The FHIR mapping is an implementation hypothesis, and the order does not mandate FHIR.
Landscape review
This landscape review tells digital health executives how long an EHR integration takes and what shortens the wait. It gives a planning range of six to twelve months from kickoff to first customer live, most of it spent on customer and EHR-vendor steps rather than code. The range is a judgment from public sources, not a measured median.
Journal of Diabetes Science and Technology
An editorial arguing that biotech commercialization should be run the way engineering is run, with specifications, measurement, and repeatable process, rather than treated as a series of one-off translational events. The piece is indexed under artificial intelligence, biotechnology, commercializatio
Journal of Translational Medicine
Patients, clinicians, administrators, regulators, and AI developers each need a reason to trust medical AI, and diabetes shows what that takes. Trust requires moving beyond single deterministic outputs to clear standards for medical AI provenance and performance, with each stakeholder holding its ow
Journal of Diabetes Science and Technology
This article argues that sharing research code in an open access, version-controlled repository benefits science and individual researchers, and aligns with the NIH Gold Standard Science program and the FAIR and TRUST principles. Pairing a cited data snapshot with a versioned code release lets reade
Journal of Diabetes Science and Technology
This article reviews new methods of continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) data analysis, called CGM Data Analysis 2.0, that use functional data analysis and artificial intelligence. Compared with traditional CGM metrics, they can give a more detailed understanding of glucose fluctuations and trends an
Journal of Diabetes Science and Technology
This article describes the Diabetes Research Hub (DRH), a centralized data management system and repository for gathering, storing, analyzing, and using diabetes data for research. It matters because advanced analytics on large datasets can support a nuanced understanding of physiological patterns a
Journal of Diabetes Science and Technology
A meeting report from the iCoDE project, which is writing the standard for getting continuous glucose monitor data into the electronic health record. The June 22, 2022 steering committee reviewed progress from six working groups. Working Group 1 set out a conceptual framework with a definition of CG
Journal of Diabetes Science and Technology
This article reports the first meeting of the iCoDE project on integrating continuous glucose monitor data into the electronic health record. Diabetes Technology Society organized it virtually on January 27, 2022, with clinicians, government officials, data aggregators, attorneys, and standards expe
Short notes from the running programs on what was done or decided. A note is not a finding until an issue carries it.
Machines can watch systems and prepare evidence. People remain responsible for decisions that cannot be reversed. This note recommends that machines take the high-volume, repetitive work where errors can be corrected, and that the line between machine and person move only when measured performance supports it.
Retention and deletion policies often exclude backups for practical reasons. The exclusion is defensible. Leaving it unstated in the notice is not. Backups usually hold the data a policy says is deleted, so a privacy notice that is silent about them misleads the people it describes.
If withholding consent does not change what a system does with a record, the consent mechanism only keeps a record of the choice. It does not enforce it.
Serious intrusions usually end with rotating every credential, key, token, certificate, and service account. Most organisations have never attempted this even partially. Full rotation is disruptive, which is why it is skipped, but a bounded drill on one class of secret shows what breaks before an intrusion forces the issue.
A verified end-to-end deletion exercises the data map, the vendor list, the backup policy, and the derived-data problem at once. Few organisations pass it on the first attempt.
A recovery objective is a statement of intent written during planning. The useful number is the one produced by the last real restore, with the date attached.
For each control that depends on a person recalling guidance under pressure, look for a technical arrangement that makes the safe action the default or the only one.
People often ask for one weighted score. Publishing it before the measures are validated would give an untested formula the look of certainty. This note recommends publishing the measures and the unanswered questions until results show which measures tell us something on their own.
Essays and articles the founder published elsewhere, referenced and never copied. An issue carries one only when it changed a decision the issue reports.
Contrarian Brief
Bad internal writing is not a writing problem. It is a respect problem. Every vague document you send asks your colleagues to finish your thinking for you. AI made the slop cheap to produce and did nothing for the cost of reading it.
Design Pattern
Regulated industries run on one rule: no document, no event. That sounds bureaucratic until you try to reconstruct a decision from six Slack threads and five different memories. Here's the pattern, and why AI just made it cheap.
Contrarian Brief
Most companies don't have a communication problem. They have an uninstrumented one. Here's how I'd use AI to score communication behavior, turn complaints into structured findings, and leave the human judgments to humans.
Working Theory
My working theory: these models are great at continuing and lousy at being done. The last stretch of a project probably needs different rules, not a smarter model — a canonical spec, scheduled audits, and a second model as judge.
Contrarian Brief
Revenue is not the same thing as being alive. A test for founders of mature software companies: if you started this company today, knowing what AI makes possible, would you build anything resembling what you now operate?
Design Pattern
The reflex when a business stakeholder derails a technical working session is to stop inviting them. That is almost always the wrong fix. What technical meetings need is rules of engagement, not walls around engineering.
Contrarian Brief
A guide for executives who think every technical problem should already be obvious to the engineering team. Simple after discovery is not the same thing as obvious before discovery, and confusing the two produces terrible management decisions.
Contrarian Brief
Alpha, in investing, is the return you cannot explain by the market. Native Alpha is the business version: the unusual advantage already sitting inside your company, your customers, your data, and your relationships, and the discipline of letting it decide what you build, buy, fund, sell, and stop.
Design Pattern
For non-trivial changes to legacy systems, define the business outcome first, then how you will prove the change works, before you estimate or build it. Outcome, evaluation, bounded discovery, incremental implementation, in that order.
Contrarian Brief
Alpha in finance is the return you cannot explain by the market. Here is what that actually means, why investors bother separating skill from luck, and which parts of the idea carry over to running a company and which do not.
Contrarian Brief
AI made building things dramatically cheaper, which quietly destroyed a lot of differentiation that was never real. How to tell commodity execution from differentiated execution, and where to spend the judgment you have left.
Contrarian Brief
Enthusiasm inside a company proves nothing. The strength of evidence for an advantage is measured by what somebody outside gave up to act on it, from a compliment at the bottom to a renewal at the top.
Contrarian Brief
The same product can be ordinary for one buyer and transformative for another. Product-asymmetry fit and the Ideal Alpha Profile explain why the customer with the biggest problem is often the wrong customer.
Contrarian Brief
Advantage is contextual, it hides at surprisingly small scales, it needs protection in the place it actually lives, and it expires. How to find it, where to put the fence, and when to admit it is gone.
Contrarian Brief
Reasoning from first principles means stripping a problem down to what you can verify and rebuilding from there. In executive hands it usually means ignoring people with experience. This is the real version, and how it fits with Native Alpha.
Working Theory
How modern engineering teams should evolve their processes, priorities, and incentives to remain relevant in the era of AI, agents and intelligent systems.
Contrarian Brief
It may sound legacy, but email and document-based workflows are the most effective user interface for launching real-world AI solutions. Here's why AI should start where customers already are.
Design Pattern
AI roadmaps are not just technical plans; they are trust strategies, implementation guides, and accountability tools. An AI roadmap for a government or a mission-driven organization has a few essential components, and a test tells whether it is ready to execute.
Working Theory
Under the DoD’s CMMC Program, maintaining continuous compliance is crucial, and machine attestation provides the consistency and accuracy human checks can’t match. By automating compliance tracking, contractors can ensure real-time verification, creating a robust audit trail and reducing compliance risks across contract lifecycles.
Practitioner Journalist
Healthcare's cybersecurity crisis is critical, with outdated defenses exposing patient data and trust. Zero Trust is now mandatory, and delays in breach detection can cause immense damage. Effective leadership, including fractional CISOs, is essential for modern defense. Inaction isn't an option, proactive steps are necessary to safeguard against sophisticated threats.
Practitioner Journalist
Venture capitalists often overlook the strategic importance of a Chief Technology Officer (CTO), mistaking technical co-founders as a simple checkbox. A seasoned CTO bridges vision and execution, aligning tech strategy with business goals, mitigating risks, and driving innovation, key factors that can make or break a startup's success.
Practitioner Journalist
High-performance computing (HPC) has revolutionized healthcare, particularly in fields like oncology and biomedical engineering, where it enables researchers to perform complex simulations and genetic analyses far quicker than traditional methods. The transition from conventional numerical analysis to dynamic generative AI has further expanded the capabilities of this powerful technology, not only enhancing patient care but also reshaping expectations for rapid medical innovation.
Design Pattern
There was a time when no one really needed a CISO. Today, an organization would be dangerously insane not to have one. And that CISO had better be top-notch. The role of the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) has evolved significantly from being solely a technology-focused professional to becoming a strategic business leader
Working Theory
Exploring the benefits of transitioning to a 'compliance as code' model by reflecting on successful implementations of other 'as code' models.
Design Pattern
Explore how a Fractional CTO can navigate the complex technological landscape in heavily regulated industries, making compliant and informed decisions.
Contrarian Brief
While a system may meet all the necessary regulations and standards, it can still be vulnerable to threats and attacks because of human attestation.
Contrarian Brief
Staff retention refers to the ability of a company to retain its employees over a period of time. It is a crucial aspect of any organization, especially in the technology sector where skilled professionals are in high demand.…
Design Pattern
Enterprise architecture is a strategic framework that helps organizations align their business and technology strategies. It provides a holistic view of the organization’s structure, processes, and systems, enabling effective…
Design Pattern
A Fractional Chief Technology Officer (CTO) is a senior-level executive who provides part-time, strategic guidance and leadership in the technology domain. Unlike a full-time CTO, a fractional CTO works on a contract basis,…
Design Pattern
A Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) is a senior executive responsible for establishing and maintaining the enterprise vision, strategy, and program to ensure information assets and technologies are adequately…
Working Theory
A Fractional Chief Technology Officer (CTO) is a highly skilled and experienced technology executive who works with companies on a part-time or project basis. They provide strategic guidance and leadership in the development…
Contrarian Brief
I challenge the conventional wisdom on cybersecurity, focusing on the problem of 'compliant insecurity'.
A position states what would make it wrong, and stands until it is settled or reversed, in public.
| Position | What would make it wrong |
|---|---|
| Eidolons: A Working Digital Reflection | Not yet stated |
| Intellectual Product-Led Growth | Not yet stated |
A correction is made in place online and runs in the next printed issue. A reversal of a position is listed, never deleted.
One standing periodical. It reports outcomes of the firm's own work: what was found, made or proved, and the decisions that changed. Company news is never its subject. Sections follow the reader's problem, never a business unit. Writing that lives elsewhere is referenced, never copied.
Every card and every article carries its claim kind: an observable fact, an opinion, a framework or an illustration. A working paper has not been peer reviewed and says so. A position states what would make it wrong.
Each article names its authors and the research record it draws on, and never poses as that record's primary source. A product enters the Journal with the article that justifies it; its releases are reported as what was made and measured.
Each article has a Markdown copy beside its page and a line in llms.txt; the quarter's items are one JSON document. /journal.json