I'm Colin. I help European organisations and businesses choose their technology, actually choose it, rather than just go with the defaults.

The pattern I keep seeing

Nobody sits down and decides to use Google Analytics to send their visitors' data to US servers, require cookie banners, to feed a profile that follows people around the web. It just… appears.

Someone sets up the website, and it's part of the package. The same goes for the CRM, the project management tool, the email platform, the web framework…

You adopt what the last place used, or what the vendor suggested, or what seemed like the obvious choice at the time.

I call this ritual mimicry: going through the motions of choosing without actually choosing.

The result is usually software that's vaguely adequate: functional, familiar, never worth reconsidering – or quietly wrong in ways you only discover later: overbuilt for your needs, priced for organisations three times your size, fighting against your workflow.

But you've got real work to do, so the software stays…

And, meanwhile, without quite meaning to, you end up with your data in jurisdictions you'd never consciously pick, your subscription fees circulating through ecosystems you'd rather not fund, and dependencies that will cost you when you eventually need to leave.

I've seen organisations discover, when it suddenly mattered, that they couldn't actually prove where their client data was stored. I've watched a two-week CRM migration turn into four months because the old system exported contacts but not communication history. These aren't always disasters, but they're expensive, exhausting, and entirely avoidable.

The longer these choices go unexamined, the harder they are to revisit. Not because the software gets worse (though that happens more than we'd like), but because it gets embedded: in workflows, in training, in workarounds, in the contracts you've signed. The cost of switching rises quietly, year by year, until it becomes the reason you don't.

You probably sense this already.

The ground has shifted

A few years ago, using American software felt like a neutral choice. It doesn't feel that way anymore.

Data agreements between the EU and US keep getting renegotiated or struck down. Platforms rewrite their terms and you click accept through habit or consent fatigue. We've watched the US government put International Criminal Court judges on sanctions lists, and then watched Microsoft dutifully kill their email accounts. The “European cloud” often has American footnotes if you read the fine print. And none of this is settling down. If anything, it's accelerating.

This doesn't means you need to panic or refuse to use anything built outside of Europe. But it does mean questions you used to be able to ignore are now worth asking: where does my data actually live? Who can access it? Is it being used to train AI models? What happens when a foreign government decides it wants something?

You didn't set out to fund surveillance with your subscriptions or hand your data to administrations you wouldn't vote for. But default choices have default consequences.

That's where I come in

I spend time with your team: asking questions, understanding what's actually working, what isn't, and what people need (which isn't always what the brief says).

I test software properly: not a half-hour demo, but days or weeks of real use, reading documentation, testing support teams and exploring edge cases.

When a vendor claims their product is “European” or “sovereign” or “GDPR-compliant”, I check what that actually means. Where are the servers? Who owns the company? What law applies? Where do the asterisks lead?

If you're choosing a CRM, an email marketing service, or a project management tool, I can tell you whether you'll actually be able to leave when you need to, what format your data exports to, what migration would realistically cost, how much of your history you'd lose.

If you're dealing with developers or agencies who know more jargon than you, I can be the person asking the questions you might not think to ask. If you're reviewing a proposal and something feels off but you can't quite articulate why, I can help you figure out what's bothering you.

It's not exciting work. But it's the work that stands between you and decisions you can't walk back.