Advice, written down and handed over

Everything below sits inside a single filed activity — SIC 62020, information technology consultancy. Every engagement ends in a document you keep and can give to anyone: your board, your team, your existing supplier, or the supplier who replaces them.

01 — Disciplines

Eight kinds of engagement

They overlap in practice; most engagements begin as one of them and borrow from a second. The scoping call establishes which shape yours is before anything is quoted.

Technology review & roadmap

The general-purpose engagement, and the usual first one. We map what you run — the systems, the suppliers, the contracts, the hosting, the data, the support arrangements and the people who quietly hold it all together — then set out what should change, in what order, and what would happen if nothing did.

Inventory of systems, suppliers, contracts and renewal dates
Interviews with the people who use the systems, not only those who own them
Risk register: what is fragile, what is unsupported, what is a single point of failure
A roadmap sequenced by dependency and risk, with indicative cost bands and effort

Typical trigger — a growth plan, a renewal, a new owner or trustee board, or a year in which too many things broke

Systems & integration architecture

Design advice for estates where several systems must agree with one another. Most of the pain organisations describe as “the software is bad” turns out to be an unowned boundary: two systems both believing they hold the customer record, and a person in the middle retyping it.

Target architecture: which system owns which record, and which merely reads it
Integration map — interfaces, direction of flow, frequency, and what is manual today
Failure behaviour: what the business does when a link is unavailable for a day
Written build notes your developers or your supplier can work from directly

Typical trigger — a new system that must join an old one, a merger of two estates, or persistent manual re-keying

Build, buy or keep

An options appraisal for a decision already on the table, written for the person who has to sign it off. The honest answer is sometimes “keep what you have for another two years” — and because we do not build or resell, that answer costs us nothing to give.

The realistic options stated plainly, including doing nothing yet
Comparison on capability, total cost over a stated period, risk, effort and lock-in
The exit question asked early: what it would take to leave each option later
A recommendation with its reasoning exposed, so a board can challenge the logic

Typical trigger — a proposal to commission bespoke software, or a product renewal with a large increase attached

Supplier selection & procurement support

Buying software well is mostly a matter of asking every vendor the same question and agreeing how you will score the answers before you hear them. We write the requirements, run the comparison, and sit on your side of the table throughout.

Requirements pack written from your process, not from a vendor's feature list
Evaluation framework and scoring agreed before proposals are opened
Attendance at demonstrations, with the questions prepared in advance
Reference calls, and a list of commercial terms worth putting to your solicitor

Typical trigger — a shortlist that was assembled by whoever answered the phone first

Delivery assurance & second opinions

For the sponsor who is told every week that the project is on track and would like that independently tested. We report to you, not to the delivery team, and we write what we find rather than what is comfortable.

Plan and scope examined against what has actually been produced
Testing and acceptance criteria reviewed — how anyone will know it is finished
Risks and issues restated in the sponsor's language, not the project's
Recommended interventions, ordered by what recovers the most for the least disruption

Typical trigger — a second missed date, a change-request pattern, or a proposal you want read before you sign it

Resilience, access & IT risk review

A practical examination of what happens when something fails. Not a certification exercise and not penetration testing — a written, prioritised answer to the questions an owner or trustee ought to be able to ask and have answered.

Backups: what is covered, how far back, and whether a restore has ever been tried
Access: who holds administrative rights, who has left and still has them
Concentration: which supplier or which individual is a single point of failure
Continuity: how long each function could operate without its system, and what the manual fallback is

Scope limit — advisory findings only. We are not a certification body, we issue no certificates, and formal accreditation work is referred to an accredited assessor

Cloud, licensing & IT cost review

Technology spend accumulates quietly: subscriptions nobody cancelled, licence tiers bought for a headcount you no longer have, hosting sized for a launch that happened three years ago. We read the spend against the use and report where the two have drifted apart.

Subscription and licence inventory against actual active users
Hosting and cloud consumption against what the workload requires
Renewal calendar, notice periods and auto-renewal traps in one place
Reduction opportunities ranked by saving against disruption — with the risky ones marked as such

Fee basis — a fixed fee or day rate agreed in advance. Never a share of the savings, which would give us a reason to overstate them

Interim technology advice for owners & boards

For organisations too small to employ a technology executive and too dependent on technology to leave the decisions to whoever is nearest. A recurring advisory session: the decisions in front of you, examined, in language that does not require a technical audience.

Periodic sessions at an agreed cadence, scheduled in advance
Papers written for owners, trustees or a board rather than for an IT department
Review of supplier proposals and quotations before they are accepted
An agreed route for the urgent question that cannot wait for the next session

Note — this is advisory only. It is not an outsourced IT department and does not include support, monitoring or administration of your systems

02 — Formats

Three ways to buy the work

Scope and fee are always agreed in writing before work starts. We do not publish a rate card, because the honest figure depends on the size of the estate and the number of people who must be spoken to — but you will have it in writing before you commit.

Single question

One decision, one short document, a fixed fee. “Should we accept this proposal?” “Is this quotation reasonable?” “Which of these two products fits the way we actually work?” Deliberately small — it is the sensible way to test a new adviser.

Shape — fixed fee · short written answer · read-out call

Fixed-scope engagement

The standard form: a review, an architecture, an appraisal or a selection exercise, with the questions, the access, the interviews, the deliverables and the dates all written into the proposal, and a fee fixed against that scope. Changes to scope are re-quoted rather than absorbed silently.

Shape — fixed fee against written scope · full report · read-out session · follow-up window

Continuing advice

An agreed number of advisory days across a period, drawn down as decisions arise, with a scheduled session at a fixed cadence. Suited to organisations facing a run of related decisions rather than a single one. Unused days are not invoiced.

Shape — day rate against an agreed allocation · scheduled sessions · no minimum term beyond the agreed period

What is included in every engagement

A written proposal before any chargeable work begins — scope, questions, access, dates and fee
A named director responsible for the work, who does it and signs it
Deliverables in a format you keep and can circulate freely inside your organisation
A read-out session for the people who need to ask questions of the findings
A follow-up window afterwards for questions about the report, at no additional charge
Confidentiality as a matter of course, and a signed non-disclosure agreement whenever you want one

03 — Boundaries

What we do not do

A consultancy is defined as much by its refusals as by its offer. These are ours, and they are not negotiable — if you need one of them, we will say so at the scoping call and, where we can, point you somewhere sensible.

Outside our activity

We do not implement. No development, no installation, no migration execution, no configuration of your systems
We do not resell. No software, hardware, licences or hosting are sold or introduced by us for a margin
We do not run your IT. No helpdesk, no monitoring, no administration, no managed service
We do not recruit. No placement, no contractor supply, no introduction fees

Outside our competence

Not legal advice. Contract terms are flagged for your solicitor, not interpreted by us
Not financial, tax or insurance advice, and not a valuation of any kind
Not a certification or accreditation body. We issue no certificates and award no marks of compliance
Not penetration testing or forensic investigation. Both are specialist disciplines and are referred out

Where an engagement uncovers something outside these limits, we say so in the report, in the section where it arises, rather than quietly widening our own scope to cover it.

04 — Fit

Where this practice fits

We are set up for organisations whose technology has outgrown informal decision-making, not for enterprises with an internal architecture function already in place.

A good fit when

A significant technology decision is imminent and nobody in the room is independent of it
The estate has grown by accretion and no one holds the whole picture any more
A single supplier holds more knowledge about your systems than you do
The board or the owner needs the position explained without jargon before signing
A project is in difficulty and the account of why keeps changing

Probably not a fit when

What you actually need is hands on keyboards — an implementer, not an adviser
You need day-to-day IT support; that is a managed service provider's work
You want a report that endorses a decision already taken; we may not reach that conclusion
You need formal certification against a scheme, which requires an accredited assessor

Getting a proposal

Write to support@ramkotech.pro with the decision you are facing, roughly how many people and systems are involved, and any date you are working towards. We reply within two business days, arrange a thirty-minute call at no charge, and — if the work is something we should do — send a written proposal with scope, deliverables, dates and fee. Nothing is chargeable until you accept it.

What to include in your enquiry

Next step

Start with the question, not the service.

You do not need to know which of the eight disciplines above applies to you. Describe the decision or the difficulty; part of our job at the scoping call is to tell you what shape of work it is, and whether it is worth commissioning at all.

support@ramkotech.pro

Contact