Executive Advisory

Better technology decisions begin with a clearer understanding of the business.

Fyrefish helps executive teams understand how their business should operate — before committing to a major technology, AI or automation investment.

Let's talk How the review works

Graeme JonesExecutive Advisor · Business & Technology Strategy

Every week brings another AI announcement, another platform, another consultant explaining why you need to transform. The instinct is to ask "what should we implement?" — and that is the wrong question.

Across three decades in global telecoms, enterprise software and non-profits, the same pattern repeats regardless of size or industry: a business problem being solved as if it were a technology one.

A reporting problemmistaken for a CRM problem.
An operational problemmistaken for an AI problem.
A business shaped by its softwareinstead of software shaped around the business.

Solve the wrong problem, and better software simply gets you to the wrong destination faster.

The Framework

Every technology decision should trace back to the business.

Software isn't your operating model — it's one way of enabling it. The review works back from strategy, not forward from tools.

01Business StrategyWhat are we trying to achieve?
02Operating ModelHow should the business operate?
03CapabilitiesWhat creates value?
04SolutionsHow do we enable it?
05DeliveryWhat's the best way?

“If we were designing this business from scratch today, how would we want it to operate?”

Differentiating

The capabilities that set you apart. Often worth designing for your organization specifically.

Commodity

Payroll, accounting, identity, payments. Long since solved — buy, don't rebuild.

Recurring Patterns

The same three signals, again and again.

Different industries, different scale — the underlying pattern rarely changes.

Reporting without insight

Leaders get reports every month, yet still can't answer simple questions — where costs are rising, which customers drive them, which activities actually create value.

The data exists. The insight doesn't.

Software driving the business

Processes quietly reshape themselves around the limits of the tools, until the software has quietly become the operating model.

The tail begins to wag the dog.

AI before strategy

The question is rarely “how do we use AI?” The better one is “where would better decisions create the most value?” — and it comes first.

AI compounds clarity, and confusion.

Technology doesn't transform a business.Better decisions do.

The Review

The Business Operating Model Review.

A focused engagement that produces six executive deliverables — clarity, priorities and a roadmap for your next significant technology decision.

01Executive BriefingFindings and recommendations, distilled.
02Operating Model AssessmentHow the business runs today — and where it should evolve.
03Capability AssessmentWhat genuinely differentiates you.
04AI & Automation AssessmentWhere AI creates measurable value — and where it doesn't.
05Build vs. Buy RecommendationsWhere to build, buy, automate or simplify.
0612–18 Month RoadmapA prioritized sequence, ordered by business value.

2–3 weeks: Typical engagement
from $7,500: Starting investment
3–5 interviews: Plus two working sessions & a presentation

Experience

Where These Ideas Came From

The ideas on this site weren't developed in a boardroom. They were earned solving real business problems — often very different from the ones clients thought they had.

Non-Profit
The roadmap that was never written
"That's where I want it."
A client wanted a five-year technology roadmap for his wall. Starting with the business instead of the systems revealed there was nothing for technology to align to — only operational information that had quietly turned into documents, and a leadership team that could no longer see its own organization.
Read the story 3 min read
Service Operations
Don't automate ambiguity
The same customer called every day for two weeks.
A telecoms provider was sure it had a communication problem between its support tiers. Listening to the calls revealed something else: no one had agreed who owned which decision, or what "resolved" even meant. The platform wasn't failing. The operating model was.
Read the story 2 min read
Enterprise Software
When listening to users leads you astray
"I work on paths."
Redesigning a large enterprise application, we spent three days with expert users. They described themselves by the software objects they worked on, not their profession. Their expertise had become the tool — and their improvement requests optimized the software, not the work it was meant to do.
Read the story 2 min read

All experience stories

Graeme Jones, Executive Advisor at Fyrefish — Graeme Jones · Executive Advisor

About

Three decades turning technology questions into business clarity.

Graeme Jones has spent more than thirty years at the intersection of business and technology — from global telecoms to enterprise software, product strategy and large-scale business transformation.

He has led the redesign of enterprise applications used by thousands, operationalized new services for major customers, and helped organizations of every size see past the software to the business underneath. Fyrefish is the distillation of that experience.