Cloudalyte is Mark Braham. One person, based in Truro and working with education organisations across the United Kingdom.
Where this comes from
My career has been spent in and around public service technology. I led IT inside NHS and education organisations before moving to the supplier side, which turned out to be the most useful thing I ever did for my understanding of how these decisions really get made.
Those two vantage points are different in a way that is hard to appreciate until you have occupied both. Inside an organisation you live with the consequences of every decision for years, and you rarely have the time or the headroom to think properly before taking them. On the supplier side you see dozens of organisations making the same decisions, you can see which ones go well, and you are almost never the person who has to live with the outcome.
Cloudalyte exists in the gap between the two. The intention is to bring the pattern recognition you get from seeing many organisations, without the commercial incentive that usually comes attached to it.
How I think about the work
Technology is an enabler. It is not the point, and it is at its best when nobody has to think about it. Most of the problems I am asked to look at turn out not to be technology problems at all. They are questions about who owns a decision, what an organisation is actually trying to achieve, or whether anyone has said the quiet part out loud.
That is why the work spans structure as well as systems. Advising on a technology estate without being willing to discuss who is accountable for it produces a report that changes nothing.
A few things I hold to:
- Say the difficult thing. You are not paying for agreement. If a plan does not work, the useful moment to hear that is before the money is committed.
- Write for the reader. A board paper that needs an interpreter has failed, however rigorous the thinking behind it.
- Smaller and finished beats larger and ongoing. A piece of work with a defined end respects your budget and keeps me honest about whether I am still adding anything.
- Independence is the whole proposition. There is nothing to resell and no margin riding on the recommendation.
Who I tend to work with
Schools, academy trusts and colleges, most often where something has changed. A trust that has grown faster than its structure. A senior team carrying a technology estate nobody fully understands. A leadership group facing a significant investment decision and wanting a second opinion before committing to it.
Occasionally that extends into the wider public sector, where the problems rhyme even when the language differs.
Getting in touch
The easiest way to find out whether there is a piece of work here is to ask.