Most organisations do not have a technology problem. They have a translation problem. I start where the work is actually done, and carry it up to the table where the money gets decided, in language that room can act on.
Most engagements start with an assessment and continue into the work, with me overseeing it. You are not handed a report and wished luck.
From where you want to go to what you build, buy and stop over the next three to five years. A technically grounded roadmap that lines up with the vision and with the budget, in choices you can defend to a board. Including the hardest part: what you will not do, and which systems and projects to stop. Delivered with owners, sequence and an estimate per step.
Where the technology stands, what is holding it back and what it costs to fix. For the company: scoring, an architecture overview, bottlenecks in order and a roadmap with owners. For the investor: independent technical due diligence, buy-side or sell-side, answering whether the technology carries the growth case in the investment thesis and what has to happen in the first hundred days.
Automation for processes that are repetitive but not predictable. Feasibility and business case: can it be done, and does it return enough. Buy or build, including what that choice means for support and dependency five years out. Designing the collaboration between people, robots and computer vision, which decides whether it works more than the technology choice does. And the step where it usually goes wrong: from pilot to production. Oversight of execution, not project management.
Two shapes, one role. Fractional when you need CTO judgement but not a full-time CTO: one to two days a week, ongoing, owning strategy and roadmap, architecture and build-or-buy, vendors and budget, the team, and security and compliance. Interim when you need a gap filled while you recruit, with full operational ownership and a handover file on the day the permanent hire starts.
Technology is rarely the reason for a deal, but often the reason it costs more than budgeted. Pre-deal: what merging two estates actually costs. Post-merger: the integration plan and oversight of its execution, through to Day 1. Carve-out: scoping the TSA, standing up standalone IT and disentangling shared systems without stopping the operation. Oversight, not project management: the decisions and the quality gate are mine, day-to-day coordination sits with your team.
Certification is rarely the goal. Usually it is the condition: a customer demands it, or the law does. I have carried responsibility in three ISO 27001 programmes: at Ampleon and Itility for the platform under audit, at Drake & Farrell for the certification itself, where it was the condition for keeping the largest contract. What I deliver is the advice around it: where you stand, what is genuinely required and what is noise, which processes matter and which partners you need. What I do not do is act as your CISO or run the programme itself; I help you put the right people on that.
Client names withheld. Full references available on request.
Independent, NDA-bound technical due diligence for an energy scale-up preparing for investment and growth. Assessed the maturity of their product, tech stack, pipelines, teams and processes, flagged anything that would cap their growth, and gave practical guidance on implementing product-led growth and balancing documentation against fast development.
The engineering was solid. A robust, genuinely innovative core, strong technical security, proper IAM. The problems sat around it, not in it. I found six bottlenecks, prioritised by how much they'd slow scaling. Among them UX friction, a support structure that couldn't scale, and a product that wasn't yet a business model. No technical red flags. The company was poised to scale, held back by a handful of bottlenecks that were all fixable.
A foundation about to scale its digital workplace and go national, with no IT staff and volunteers who needed to be productive on day one. The brief went beyond assessment: compared Google Workspace against Microsoft 365 feature by feature, including the nonprofit tiers and the GDPR exposure of each, then delivered the full migration to Google Workspace.
We chose Google Nonprofit, mainly for the ease of use. The goal wasn't to scale the workplace itself, but to give the foundation a workplace that could carry national growth, with personal and financial data kept entirely out of shared drives. Delivered as a one-page implementation plan a volunteer could follow, now being rolled out as planned.
I came up through the engineering side and ended up in the boardroom, not the other way around. That direction matters: it is the difference between advice that survives contact with a delivery team and advice that does not.
Since 2024 I have been Head of Digital & IT and Head of Innovation & Robotics at Logicall (Drake & Farrell). That comes with €3M annual OpEx, a permanent team of sixteen, and the technical and digital integration of Drake & Farrell into the Logicall Group. There I achieved ISO 27001, cut lead time by 80% and inventory errors by 30% through AI vision and drone counting, and held team churn at zero.
I also developed an automated de-kit and sorting line for returns, where nothing is predictable: the packaging is unknown, the contents are unknown and there is no order to reconcile against. A cutting arm opens boxes of any size, tracking codes are read on the way in, people handle the unpacking, and computer vision follows every box and component through the line so robot arms downstream can sort by type, owner and product ID. The design was the hard part, not the technology.
Before that, ten years at Itility: platform work for ASML's EUV lithography machines, KPN's Managed Hybrid Cloud, data platforms for TNO and Priva, and Head of Product for Demy, an in-company AI venture taken from R&D to commercial launch. Through those years I advised C-level stakeholders and translated technical risk into business cases for multi-million euro initiatives.
Alongside that, co-founder of Frankendael, six products into national supermarket distribution. And before it all, IT service manager in Shanghai, forty SMB customers with fifteen engineers.
The through-line is the same in all of it: standing between people who know what is technically true and people who control the budget, and making sure they understand each other well enough to decide.
Two things you do not buy but ask someone to take on: giving a lecture, and taking a seat.
A consultant who teaches is a consultant who can explain. What a room of seventeen-year-olds demands is the same thing a board demands: no jargon, no hiding behind the acronym, get to the point that matters. Most technologists have never had to practise it.
That is not theory here: alongside a permanent team of sixteen, Logicall runs a rotating cohort of twenty-five students on real projects, through academic partnerships I set up myself.
If you run a programme, a lecture series or a conference track and want someone who has actually built the thing being discussed, get in touch.
Available for a Raad van Advies or Raad van Toezicht seat, at organisations where technology has become a governance question and nobody at the table can hold the conversation. Not a service you buy but a seat you appoint someone to.
One fixed rule: at organisations whose board I sit on, I take no paid engagements. A seat calls for independent judgement, and you cannot give that on work you sold yourself. I stay clear of conflicts of interest, even when it costs me an engagement.
Tell me what you want to achieve and where you are running into trouble. I will take it from there.
info@bluebase.techThe Netherlands. Working across Europe, remote and on site.
Assessments within two to three weeks. Interim roles by arrangement.