RESEARCH PAPERS
Our research explores digital enterprise transformation, enterprise architecture and information technology. Each paper can be read here or downloaded as a PDF.
Nextcloud: The Microsoft 365 Alternative
November 2026Microsoft 365 is the default digital workplace, and for a growing class of organizations it is the wrong default: the subscriptions compound, the data lives under foreign law, and the whole working environment is rented from a single vendor that owns the roadmap and the exit. This is a position paper, not a neutral survey: we recommend Nextcloud as the Microsoft 365 alternative for organizations that want a collaboration platform they control, hosted where their own law reaches, built on open source they can audit and extend. We map it honestly against Microsoft 365 feature by feature, are candid about where Microsoft is still ahead, and make the practical case that leaving is a managed project rather than a leap: Nashua implements, migrates, supports and, above all, leads the change, deploying it where you want it, from EU-managed hosting to a fully on-premises rollout on your own hardware.
IT Workforce Attrition and the Delayed Dead Sea Effect
October 2026Why IT organizations recognize selective attrition only after the point of no return, a theoretical model developed separately for software engineers and system administrators in the Dutch market.
A Best-of-Breed Chain for AI-Assisted Software Development
June 2026Why the hard part of AI-assisted development is verification, not generation, and the best-of-breed chain of loops and gates we build and run the Nashua 360 Enterprise Platform on: Claude Code, GitHub, Vercel, Next.js and Postgres.
The Monoculture Premium
May 2026When standardizing the IT landscape makes the enterprise more fragile, and how much to standardize instead, a closed-form optimal number of platforms, effective diversity, and the premium that consolidation business cases do not show.
The Federation Trilemma
February 2026Local autonomy, enterprise-wide consistency and speed of change: why an IT operating model can have any two, and why hybrid models sit in a middle that does not exist, a minimal model bounds the three goods and derives the three coherent operating models.
From RPA Rules to AI Recursion
November 2025Robotic process automation records a fixed sequence of clicks against interfaces it does not understand, so it decays as the world drifts and its maintenance bill eats its savings. AI agents substitute for it by closing a loop a recording cannot, improving the automation from its own execution, and the Six Sigma DMAIC cycle, read as a standing control structure rather than a one-off project, is what keeps that recursive loop converging instead of drifting. A simple model gives a substitution condition: the agent replaces the bot when its governed loop removes error faster than the environment injects it.
Six Things Called Digital Transformation, and Why Boards Fund the Wrong One
November 2025A classification of transformation types, the category errors that make programs fail, and a key for telling which one you are in, six undertakings share one name, and funding one as another is a predictable cause of failure.
DORA regulated IT compliance at holding companies that service local subsidiaries across the EU
March 2025DORA binds each regulated subsidiary individually, yet a pan-European group runs its critical ICT from one shared core in the parent, creating a compliance–control asymmetry and a correlated concentration risk. A minimal model of the trade-off, read against DORA's register, concentration, contract, incident, testing and governance provisions, and a target operating model that keeps the central core while giving every entity and supervisor the governed relationship the regulation requires.
IT Readiness for Joint Ventures and M&A
September 2024Preparing a global IT landscape to partner a division, a joint venture, an acquisition or a merger, or to separate one, a sale, spin-off or listing, without saying which: one symmetric globalization program that makes every entity separable and combinable, cloaks the intent, keeps vital capability in a core the group keeps, and stands up a due-diligence dossier, so a counterparty is met in days, not years. The same readiness serves either move, and the model prices the friction entanglement adds to each.
IT Department Solipsism
June 2023When an IT organization takes its own metrics, roadmap and architecture for the center of the business, and how to turn the lens back outward, four manifestations of the inward turn, a minimal model of the gap between what IT counts and what the business realizes, and the outward-facing measures that close it.
IT Offshoring: Command and Delivery
October 2022IT offshoring to India disappoints firms that offshore the wrong thing: they ship out responsibility along with execution, cutting the work loose from the context and judgement that make it correct, and rework eats the saving. The repair is a thin, senior onshore command center, a stateside command center, in American practice, that keeps intent, architecture, specification and acceptance at home while execution scales offshore. We model where the line should fall (a task's context load against the specification completeness the command center can give it) and derive an optimal command ratio: neither throwing work over the wall nor keeping it all at home is right, and the cost-minimizing amount of command is finite, positive and computable.