Hello, I'm Colin
I help European organisations make better software decisions – and undo the ones they regret.
You might be here because:
- You're about to invest in a new tool and can't tell the good options from the well-marketed ones.
- Your tech stack is costing more (or doing less) than it should.
- You're using tools chosen by someone who left three jobs ago, and no one remembers why.
- You're planning to move off a major platform and aren't sure where to start.
- A software migration isn't going to plan and you need a second pair of eyes.
- You're watching what's happening across the Atlantic and wondering what it means for the data you've got sitting on American servers.
Whichever one brought you here, my job is generally the same: understand the constraints, examine the options, and help you make a choice you won't regret in a year.
How I work
Most projects I work on follow a similar shape:
Understanding how your organisation works.
I spend time with you and your team, ask questions, and find out what's really happening: what's working, what isn't, and what people actually need (not necessarily what the brief says).
Testing realistic options.
No half-hour demos but days or weeks of real, actual, use. I study the documentation, poke the support team repeatedly, and explore the edge cases you might encounter.
Mapping the risks and exits before you commit.
I look at vendor lock-in, data jurisdiction, export formats, hidden dependencies, and what migration would really cost – in money, but also in time and lost history.
Along the way, I help with the awkward questions: the ones you might not think to ask, or the ones a vendor has carefully steered you away from.
Ways I can help
Technology risk assessment
Find out where you stand
A fixed-price review of the SaaS tools and platforms your organisation depends on.
You'll get a map of where your data lives, what would be hard to replace, and a prioritised list of what to address first; not a 60-page report that nobody reads.
€ 1400
10 business days
Software Selection
The homework you don't have time to do
For organisations choosing a new tool or replacing one that's failed them.
I narrow the field, test real options seriously, and document the trade-offs clearly enough to explain them to your team and your future self.
Contact for tailored quote
3-6 weeks typical
Ongoing Advisory
A second opinion, whenever you need one
A standing second opinion for when tech decisions come up.
Light-touch, retained, shaped around how your team actually works.
Contact for retainer details
Ongoing, flexible
When I'm probably not the right fit
- You need someone to build or maintain software.
- You've already made the decision and just want validation.
- Nobody involved can act on what I recommend.
If that's you, an IT services firm or an implementation partner is probably a better starting point. If I can point you somewhere useful, I will.
Many tech stacks are built by default, not by design
- An agency set up the website and the analytics tool just came along with it.
- Email is Gmail or Outlook because that's just what email is now.
- The CRM is whatever someone's last employer used.
- The marketing tool is the one with the chimp because… well, everyone knows the one with the chimp.
- The project management tool is the same one the competition uses because, if it works for them, it should work for us, right?
These aren't bad decisions per se, but they're decisions that never really got made. One default leads to the next, and over time they just become the stack.
I call this ritual mimicry: going through the motions of choosing without really doing any choosing.
It works fine … until your realise you're paying for three tools that do the same thing, or a vendor changes the rules, or a team member says “we need to move” and no one knows where to start.
That's usually when I get the call.
And what happens when someone else controls the off switch?
What looks like a practical question can also be a political one.
It's not just about which tool is best, but who you rely on, where your data lives, and how dependent you've slowly become.
The US president probably isn't going to come for your email account. But the kill switch that made this possible sits in the same infrastructure you're running on.
And it doesn't necessarily take a direct order targeting your organisation. It could be a trade dispute, the EU fining big tech, a law Washington disapproves of…
Under the current administration, the trigger for hitting that switch could change with the weather.
Considering this, it might be worth thinking about bringing your tools closer to home.
Curious where your organisation actually stands?
I built a digital sovereignty scanner. Point it at your own domain and see how European your infrastructure really is.
European alternatives are no longer a compromise.
- The ICC itself switched to an open-source suite built in Europe.
- Amnesty International Spain moved its file sharing onto infrastructure it controls.
- France is moving its digital government agency (DINUM) onto Linux and sovereign tools.
- The Dutch Central Bank is moving to a European cloud provider.
- A growing number of businesses, NGOs, foundations, and mission-driven organisations are doing the same. Not as a political statement, but as an operational one.
I'm not chasing ideological purity here. Sometimes the right tool isn't European. But, the point is to make that choice knowingly.
A few recent projects
A sustainable packaging company
They were running on a project management platform built for organisations three times their size: overcomplicated, slow, invasive, and hosted outside Europe. We replaced it with something that matched how they actually worked and that was simpler, cheaper, open-source and European-hosted.
A bicycle leasing company
They needed a very specific set of email marketing capabilities. A European option existed – we tried it seriously – but the support was so unresponsive it represented a genuine operational risk. We chose the American alternative knowingly, documented the reasoning, and kept the European option on the list to revisit. Sometimes the honest answer is: not yet.
A European organisation for natural healthcare ingredients
They needed an analytics setup that didn't contradict their own values around transparency and data privacy. We built a stack that gave them just the insights and funnels they needed, kept everything in Europe, and didn't quietly harvest the data of the people they were trying to serve.
A bit about me
I've been in technology long enough to have co-founded one of the very first internet service providers, and I've lived through several waves of certainty about how computing was “definitely going to work from now on”.
For most of that time, clients paid me to build things. What they kept coming back for, though, was the thinking around the build: the right decisions, the vendor claims that didn't hold up, the obscure questions nobody had asked yet.
Eventually it became clear that part was the real work, so that's what I do now.
Have a project in mind?
Tell me what you're dealing with, I'll let you know honestly whether I can help.
And, if I can't, I'll point you somewhere useful.
Not quite ready?
I write a short daily email about making better technology choices: practical, no hype, no pitches.
Yes, it really is daily. And yes, people stick around.