A pattern that has recurred this year: organisations arrive with a transformation that is well argued and badly steered. The strategy work was serious; the operating decisions beneath it were never made with the same rigour. By the time it becomes visible, it looks like an execution problem — but it began, months earlier, as a governance one. The useful question is rarely whether the plan is right. It is who decides what, on what evidence, once the plan runs into reality.
Independent Executive Advisory
Better decisions.
Stronger execution.
Jens Hartmann Advisory advises senior leaders on transformation, governance and technology decisions — from someone who has carried them as a senior IT executive, not only advised on them.
Edition ·
Measured by the decision, not the advice.
Most advice ends with the recommendation. This advisory is measured by something harder: whether the decision actually got better — and whether it held up once it was put into practice.
What the work offers is independent judgment — nothing to sell on afterwards, no method to defend. It is taken on selectively, where an outside view will change the outcome rather than just confirm it.
When a question can no longer be settled in-house.
Four situations come up again and again. In each of them, the organisation can no longer settle the question with its own people alone.
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Transformation outgrows its steering.
The ambition is set and the work has begun, but the structure meant to carry it has not kept pace.
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Governance is no longer strong enough.
The scale of the change has outgrown the decision rights and oversight that were set up for a steadier state.
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Technology choices now shape the operating model.
A technology decision is no longer technical: it settles how the organisation will run.
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Leadership needs an independent perspective.
A critical phase calls for a discreet outside view — one with no stake in the internal version of events.
Judgment formed inside the role.
The judgment on offer was formed while accountable for executive decisions — not only while advising on them. It stays with the quality of the decision rather than the volume of activity, and keeps strategy tied to the conditions it will be executed in.
Dr. Jens Hartmann is an independent executive advisor for transformation, governance and technology decisions. Behind the advisory is a career as a senior IT executive — more than fifteen years of group-wide IT strategy, governance and large-scale transformation in regulated, asset-intensive organisations.
From current work.
A continuing, dated register — one structural pattern at a time, in Jens Hartmann's own words. The most recent entry:
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Jens Hartmann Advisory takes on few mandates at a time. If a decision now in front of you would benefit from an independent view, a direct email is the place to start.