Value and reuse · Operating model
After go-live: reuse, cost and who owns the value
The first model in production felt like the finish line. It was the start of a different problem: who reuses it, who pays for it, and who owns the value.
I take data and AI from idea to governed production in regulated organisations, and into real use.
Most organisations are not short of ideas or pilots. They are short of the connective work between a promising proof of concept and something the business can actually run, fund and rely on. That work is part product, part platform, part governance, and mostly translation.
I'm a technical product owner for an enterprise machine learning and AI platform in a New Zealand bank. I own the product strategy, the roadmap and the route a model takes from someone's experiment to a service the organisation depends on, and I care just as much about what happens next: who uses it, what gets reused and what it costs. I write here about how to make that route shorter and still safe.
Case studies
Governance · Operating model
Designing a production gate across six control functions
Every team was rediscovering the same route through governance. Building the route once, without taking authority away from anyone.
Platform adoption · Operating model
Improving platform onboarding as a product problem
Getting a new team productive on a shared platform took weeks. Almost none of that was technical setup.
Enterprise ML · Regulated banking
Taking a machine learning capability from experiment to production service
A well-performing model that no part of the organisation was structured to run. What it took to close that gap, and what it cost.
Product discovery · Sports analytics startup
Choosing what not to build when the data already existed
Every input the predictive version needed already existed. Building it first would still have been the wrong call, and the reason generalises well beyond sport.
Frameworks
AI governance
Responsible AI as an Operating Model
A principle changes nothing until it is attached to an artefact, a gate and a named owner. What that looks like, and what changes when the model is bought rather than built.
Prioritisation
Decision Under Constraint
How to prioritise when engineering, risk, compliance, security and the business all want different things and all of them are right.
Platform operating models
The Platform Responsibility Line
A platform that owns too little is ignored. A platform that owns too much becomes the bottleneck it was built to remove.
Governed adoption
Governance as a Path
Control functions are not the obstacle. Making every team rediscover the route through them is.
POC to production
The Production Distance Model
Why proofs of concept stall, and how to measure the distance between a working demo and a service the organisation can run.
Writing
Books and ideas
Carlota Perez
Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital
Why the value in a technology shift lands decades later, with whoever rebuilds the institutions around it.
Donella Meadows
Thinking in Systems
Short, plain, and the reason I look for the feedback loop before I look for the person who made the mistake.
Brian Christian
The Alignment Problem
A history of the distance between what we specify and what we meant, written before that became a procurement question.
Contact
Worth writing to me about: questions about anything here, disagreements with any of it, and conversations with people working on the same problems inside their own organisations.