FDE and Business Discovery
How an engagement starts: inside the business, on the real work, with the people who actually do it.
What this collection argues
Describe the discovery method itself — observation, interview, mapping, baselining, pilot selection — and why work done away from the operating environment produces recommendations that do not survive contact with it.
In this collection
5 articles. Each one opens with the business problem, names the executive who owns the outcome, and ends with the metrics that would show whether the work paid.
Why Enterprise AI Requires People Who Understand the Business from the Inside
Advice produced away from the operating environment describes the documented process, not the one that runs, so recommendations meet the floor as untested assumptions rather than as changes.
The First 30 Days of a Forward-Deployed Enterprise AI Engagement
The first month of an embedded engagement should produce a shared map of the work, a measured baseline, access to real data and one agreed pilot, not a design document and a proposal.
How to Map a Business Process Before Building an AI Agent
A usable process map records roles, inputs, decisions, handoffs, exceptions, systems, controls and outputs, because the missing elements are what an agent inherits as silent assumptions.
The Executive Interview Questions That Reveal Hidden AI Opportunities
Useful executive interviews ask about the day rather than the strategy, and a small set of role-specific questions surfaces the repeated work, rework and waiting that AI can actually address.
From Consultant's Recommendation to Working Business System
A recommendation becomes a working system through a fixed sequence of process design, structured data, application, integration, controls and an operating workflow, with evidence required at every step.