Field Notes
Practical, first-hand notes on ERP delivery, IT governance, PDPL, cybersecurity and digital transformation — written from twenty years of running enterprise systems in Saudi Arabia and Jordan.
ZATCA e-invoicing readiness: an IT manager's checklist
FATOORAH compliance is not a finance project with an IT ticket attached — it is an ERP integration program with a tax deadline. Here is how to run it properly.
AI in the construction back office: the use cases that actually pay
Skip the robots and the renderings. The measurable returns today are in documents, data entry and analysis — the paper-heavy middle of the business.
The zero-downtime migration: lessons from moving a company to the cloud over a weekend
A cloud email migration is judged in the first hour of Monday morning. Everything that makes that hour quiet happens in the six weeks before.
The 99.9% playbook: what eleven years of uptime actually took
Three nines is not a hardware specification — it's a set of habits. Redundancy gets the credit; discipline does the work.
ITIL without the bureaucracy: service management for a ten-person IT team
You don't need a service catalog with 400 entries. You need five disciplines, applied consistently, that turn a reactive IT team into a dependable one.
Building your PDPL Record of Processing Activities: a step-by-step guide
The ROPA is the backbone of Saudi PDPL compliance — the register everything else hangs from. Here is how to build one that survives an audit and stays alive afterwards.
Ransomware and the contractor: a defense plan for companies without a SOC
Construction firms are attractive targets — large payments, distributed sites, thin security teams. Most of the defense that matters is discipline, not products.
Your P6 schedule is full of decisions nobody is making
Primavera files hold the earliest warnings a construction business gets — buried under 8,000 activities. Translation, not more reporting, is the missing discipline.
Executive dashboards leadership actually opens: five rules from the field
Most BI projects die of politeness — dashboards nobody asked for, answering questions nobody was asking. The fix is editorial, not technical.
Point-to-point is a debt: designing integrations that survive the next system
Every quick interface between two systems feels efficient. Ten of them later, you own a web nobody can change — and the ERP upgrade that should take weeks takes a year.
After go-live: making the ERP stick when the consultants leave
Go-live is not the finish line — it's the moment the organization decides, quietly and collectively, whether to actually use the system you built.
Data migration: the workstream that quietly decides your go-live
Nobody puts data cleansing on the executive dashboard — until the trial load fails and the go-live date moves. Treat migration as a project, not a task.
Choosing an ERP vendor: a scoring framework that survives the demo
Demos are theater. A weighted scorecard built on your own scenarios is the only defense against buying the best presentation instead of the best system.
Modernizing IT without breaking operations
A pragmatic approach to upgrading infrastructure while the business keeps running at full speed.
PDPL in practice: a builder's checklist
What it actually takes to stand up a data-protection program that satisfies auditors and protects the business.
Why ERP projects fail before go-live
The real risks in an ERP implementation show up long before the system does — in scope, sponsorship, and change readiness.