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IT governance — guides and articles
20 articles published between September 2025 and September 2026. Where to start is below; the rest follow, newest first.
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Nobody Can Buy an Audit Until Somebody Says What Arrives
An independent system audit is not a verdict on your IT. It is six documents and a fix list: named owners, licence against actual usage, a system of record per shared object, and every finding priced by what it costs you in a month if nothing changes.
Healthcare and clinics6 min read
Your Claim Cycle Lives in One Person's Calendar
There is a person in every clinic who knows when the submission is due, how many resubmissions a claim has had, and which payer is slow. When that person takes leave, the clinic does not slow down — it silently stops meeting deadlines, and finds out six weeks later.
23 September 2026ReadHealthcare and clinics6 min read
A Clinical Record You Can Quietly Rewrite Is Not a Record
Retention periods for clinical records are measured in decades, access logs in years, and hosting is constrained by law. All three are properties a system either has from the first day or cannot be given later, and the third one rules out the cloud regions most vendors quote from.
23 September 2026ReadHR and payroll6 min read
Who Can Change a Salary, and Who Would Know?
Payroll is the one process in most companies where a single person can create a payee, set an amount, approve it and send the file. The controls that would prevent that are cheap, standard and almost never configured, because payroll is implemented under deadline by whoever can make it run.
23 September 2026ReadAI10 min read
The AI Supplier Questions Procurement Should Be Asking and Usually Is Not
Your security questionnaire was written for software that does the same thing every time you run it. The AI feature your vendor shipped last quarter does not, it can change without a release note, and the questions that would have caught that are not on the form.
9 September 2026ReadProcess automation9 min read
Getting Approvals Out of WhatsApp and Into a System People Still Use
Every company that has tried this has failed at least once, and the failure is always the same shape: the new approval flow was slower than the old one, so the old one came back. The chat is not a bad habit. It is the fastest thing available, and nothing beats it by being more correct.
9 September 2026ReadContracts8 min read
The Clauses That Decide What It Costs You to Leave
Nobody negotiates the exit terms of a system they are excited about buying. Which is why, five years later, the quotation to get your own data out in a usable form arrives at a number that makes staying the cheaper option — and everybody calls that a strategy decision.
9 September 2026ReadAI12 min read
ISO/IEC 42001: The Scope You Draw in Month One Decides the Bill
A procurement team has blocked your deal and a consultancy has quoted you a number. Most of that number is a scoping decision nobody has made yet. What the standard actually requires, what an auditor asks to see, and when the honest answer is that you do not need it.
9 September 2026ReadAI9 min read
You Hold ISO 27001. How Much of ISO 42001 Do You Already Have?
The answer you will be given depends on who is quoting. A consultancy selling a programme says almost none of it; one selling a bolt-on says nearly all. The truthful answer is that you have built the machinery and none of the content, and the two halves are easy to tell apart if you know where the seam runs.
9 September 2026ReadData governance10 min read
One Owner Per Data Domain, Named — Or Three Versions of Every Number
Everybody agrees the customer master is a mess and everybody agrees somebody should fix it. The reason nobody does is not laziness. It is that the person who would have to say no to a colleague has never been named, and a rule nobody is authorised to enforce is a preference.
9 September 2026ReadIT governance7 min read
The Software You Are Paying For and Nobody Uses
Part of what your company spends on software goes to products nobody opens, seats belonging to people who left, and subscriptions on a personal credit card that will renew after the person who bought them has gone. Nobody knows how large that part is, which is the finding.
9 September 2026ReadIT governance13 min read
Nobody Can Buy an Audit Until Somebody Says What Arrives
An independent system audit is not a verdict on your IT. It is six documents and a fix list: named owners, licence against actual usage, a system of record per shared object, and every finding priced by what it costs you in a month if nothing changes.
9 September 2026ReadData governance10 min read
UAE Data Protection as a Systems Problem: Where Personal Data Actually Lives
The legal summary is short and everybody has read one. The part nobody has done is the part that decides whether any of it is achievable: finding out how many copies of an employee's passport your estate is holding, and which of them anyone can delete.
9 September 2026ReadData governance9 min read
Decide Which System Holds the Truth, Before You Integrate Anything
Two systems disagree about a customer's credit limit and both are technically correct. The integration between them will not settle it, because an integration copies data and the disagreement is not about data. It is about which system was allowed to decide.
9 September 2026ReadUAE compliance12 min read
Surviving an FTA Audit With the ERP You Already Have
An audit is a reconciliation, not an inspection. Which of the questions an auditor asks your ERP can answer from the database, and which ones it silently cannot without a person and a spreadsheet.
13 August 2026ReadIT governance12 min read
Who Can Change a Price at Two in the Morning
Most mid-market ERP fraud is not clever. It is enabled by a permissions decision taken in week three of the project to unblock a go-live, and never revisited. What segregation of duties actually means when you have eleven people in finance.
12 August 2026ReadDigital transformation13 min read
Transformation Before Platform: The Decision the Software Cannot Make for You
Digital transformation is a decision about how the business runs. The platform is only the instrument. Buying the instrument first is why so many programmes end with a new system and the same company.
12 August 2026ReadERP architecture12 min read
Cloud, Private Hosting or On-Premise: The UAE Version of the Question
The hosting decision is usually argued as cost and settled as ideology. The four questions that actually decide it are residency, latency at the point of work, who is accountable at two in the morning, and how you get your data back.
4 August 2026ReadAI11 min read
AI Agents in Your ERP: What Is Real and What Is Still a Demo
The demo lasts four minutes and it works every time. Here is what AI agents genuinely do inside business systems today, what quietly fails in production, and the permissions design, audit trail and named owner an agent needs before it touches a ledger.
15 July 2026ReadUAE compliance12 min read
Corporate Tax Did Not Arrive as a Return. It Arrived as a Data Structure.
The corporate tax return asks questions your general ledger was never designed to answer. The fix is a chart of accounts and a set of dimensions decided before the year starts, not a spreadsheet assembled after it ends.
20 June 2026Read
Reporting14 min read
Why Your ERP Dashboard Is Lying to You
An Omani fisherman reads the sky, the wind and the water. Your dashboard reads whatever it was told to measure. The gap between those two is where confident, wrong decisions get made.
18 September 2025ReadAfter the reading
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