Advice its author has to deliver.

Altuon holds no resale agreements and takes no referral fees from technology vendors, and the proposal for any consulting engagement states this in writing. Where a recommendation favours a product or supplier, the evaluation that produced it is a deliverable you keep, with the alternatives and the reasons they were rejected. Our own engineering and AI practices are treated as one option among the sourcing candidates: they compete on the same criteria, their proposal is reviewed by the same panel, and the consulting team that wrote the strategy does not score them. A recommendation to buy elsewhere, or to build with your own people, is a complete and successful outcome of the engagement.

Separately, always. The strategy, architecture or due-diligence engagement is scoped, priced and invoiced on its own, and it is complete when its gates are signed, whether or not any delivery follows and whoever does it. If you later engage Altuon to build, that is a second agreement with its own scope, its own commercial terms and its own acceptance criteria. Nothing in the consulting fee is contingent on delivery work being awarded, and no delivery discount is offered in exchange for a favourable recommendation. The two agreements can be terminated independently.

Under a mutual confidentiality agreement signed before the Discover phase begins, covering everything we read, hear and produce. Working papers are held in an engagement workspace in the region you specify — Switzerland, the European Union, Jordan or the United States — with access limited to the named team, and they are returned or destroyed at close on your instruction with written confirmation. Strategy documents are never used as references, case studies or sales material without your written consent, and the sub-processor list for the engagement names every tool that could hold your material.

Through the case itself. The board approves a case with a baseline, expected benefits, a sequence and explicit kill conditions for each initiative. The programme is then run through stage gates that require evidence — architecture conformance, security and regulatory sign-off, benefit tracking on schedule — before work proceeds. The steering group holds the authority to pause or stop an initiative whose case no longer holds, and the escalation rules oblige the programme to report a threatened gate before it is missed, not after. Risk is tracked in a register the sponsor sees at every steering meeting, with owners and responses, and the register is part of what audit receives.

A short report in the board's own register at each scheduled meeting, and an exception report between meetings if a gate is threatened or a kill condition is approaching. The regular report covers progress against the approved sequence, benefits tracked against the baseline, the top risks and the decisions the board is being asked to take. Non-executive directors can request the underlying evidence for any line, and a member of the engagement team attends to answer questions directly. The same report format is used from Discover through Operate, so the board is never asked to learn a new way of reading the programme.

The engagement has done its job. Every deliverable is written for a delivery team that has not met us: the architecture register, the transition states, the sourcing evidence, the operating model and the governance charter are yours on payment and complete enough to start from. We hand over to the chosen team in a structured session, remain available for clarification on agreed terms, and — if you wish — continue in the Prove phase to measure the landed programme against the case, which is often more useful when the builder and the assessor are not the same firm.

It must, and it does from the first phase. Residency and supervision requirements under the revised Swiss FADP, the GDPR, Jordan's Personal Data Protection Law, DORA and FINMA's outsourcing expectations are captured in the obligation register during Discover and shape the target architecture rather than filtering it afterwards. Where the answer is on-premises infrastructure or a national cloud, the strategy states what that footprint costs, which products and skills fit it and which do not, and how the organisation will operate it. Where a hosted service is acceptable, the residency, audit and exit terms it must carry are written into the sourcing recommendation.