Thirty-seven years of watching the same seam break. A2O is the methodology that came out of it.

From the wires, to the boardroom, to the architect’s desk.

Kevin started in 1987 as a network engineer at Northwest Airlines. He spent the 1990s in the management chair at H.B. Fuller — eventually as Director of IT Operations reporting directly to the CIO, running a global portfolio across the U.S., Europe, Latin America, and Asia Pacific. The 2000s he spent as an architect: Principal Domain Lead and Solutions Architect at Prime Therapeutics, then nine years inside Cisco Systems as a Solutions Integration Architect — this time on the vendor side of customer design rooms.

That arc — engineer → manager → director → in-house architect → vendor-side solution lead — is unusual. Most enterprise architects have never run an operations budget. Most operations directors have never designed a target architecture. Each chair was the vantage point the next one was missing.

A2O is what came out the other end. It’s the methodology Kevin wished had existed every time a strategy deck landed in an IT department that couldn’t execute it, and every time a technical assessment landed on an executive committee that didn’t read it. Top-Down and Bottom-Up running in parallel from day one. Five pillars. Five signed deliverables. One roadmap.

Five operating principles — not slogans.

• Top-Down without Bottom-Up is a fantasy. Strategy that doesn’t survive contact with the actual IT estate is the leading cause of transformation failure.
• Bottom-Up without Top-Down is busywork. Technical modernisation untethered from business outcomes optimises the wrong things.
• Deliverables are decisions, not documents. The five A2O artifacts are signed by named executives. If nobody signs, it isn’t a deliverable.
• Independent advice means refusing to take vendor money. We don’t accept referral fees, vendor commissions, or sponsorships. The technology recommendation is whatever fits your gaps.
• Execution outlives the engagement. The governance forum we design in pillar 5 is owned by you, run by your leadership, and survives our departure.