See the whole system
Technology, people, processes, dependencies and ownership behave as one system. A symptom in one place often has its cause somewhere else.
About PDW
Judgment earned on
difficult technology problems.
PDW is an independent technology advisory practice. Behind it is an advisor who has worked through hard problems as a technologist, architect and technology leader, and who now helps organizations understand what is true and decide what to do next.
Mike Mulcahy Founder & Technology Advisor
See how PDW thinksSystems thinkingIndependent judgmentDirect relationships
01 / The perspective behind PDW
See the whole system.
Find what matters.
Important technology problems rarely arrive neatly labelled. What looks like a tooling question may be an ownership question. What looks like a technical risk may be a decision nobody has made yet.
PDW’s work starts by understanding the situation well enough to see which is which.
Find what is actually true
Separate evidence from assumption before recommending anything. The appropriate solution should follow the evidence, not arrive ahead of it.
Make it decidable
Translate technical complexity into clear choices, tradeoffs and next steps that leaders can understand and act on.
The domains vary. The discipline doesn’t.
Resilience and recovery, architecture, technology decisions, AI and automation: each is a different kind of system, examined the same way. Systems thinking and judgment are what connect the work.02 / Experience
Experience shaped by
difficult problems.
Mike Mulcahy’s career has moved from hands-on technology work into architecture, technology leadership and advisory work. It includes roughly a decade supporting continuity and disaster recovery work in the Department of Defense contractor environment, and his current role as a Senior Cloud Engineer and Cloud Disaster Recovery Lead in an enterprise organization.
Resilience and recovery became his deepest area of expertise. Each stage also added something to how he approaches any difficult problem.
Technologist
How systems actually work.
Hands-on work shows what documentation leaves out: how systems behave, fail and recover.
Architect
How the parts relate.
Dependencies, tradeoffs and the long-term consequences of design choices across a whole environment.
Leader
What decisions mean for people.
Connecting technology choices to organizations, ownership and consequences, in roles that called for executive judgment as well as technical depth.
Advisor
Bringing it together.
Using all three perspectives to help others make decisions they can stand behind.
When the problem becomes real
Trust is earned through
consistent judgment.
During a ransomware incident, a longtime former client, a medical office, called Mike. He was roughly 800 miles away, serving in an interim CTO role.
The owner called because he trusted Mike’s judgment. Mike helped with initial triage and next steps, and connected the organization with appropriate help.
When a situation becomes uncertain and consequential, people call someone whose judgment they trust. PDW is built to deserve that call, as an expert and as a person.
03 / How PDW works with clients
Good advisory work
should make the client stronger.
PDW is built on relationships rather than volume. The measure of an engagement is whether you leave better informed, calmer and more capable of acting, not how much further work it creates.
Direct access
You work with the person doing the thinking, from the first conversation through the recommendation.
Understanding before prescribing
PDW does not arrive with a predetermined answer. The work starts with what is happening and why.
Independent judgment
Advice follows what serves your organization, including when the right answer is a smaller change, a later one, or another provider.
Respectful challenge
Good advice sometimes means questioning an assumption. PDW does that directly and constructively, with the reasoning visible.
Practical recommendations
Recommendations fit your capacity and how your organization actually works, with a clear next step.
Capability, not dependency
PDW explains its reasoning and transfers understanding so your team can own what comes next.
If you take the recommendations and handle the next steps yourselves, that is a good outcome.
04 / Built intentionally small
Small by design,
not by default.
PDW is designed around a small number of direct advisory relationships, not a large consulting staff. Success is measured by the quality of the decisions it helps you make.
For you, that means direct access, continuity of thinking from one conversation to the next, the right specialist when one is genuinely needed, and less organizational overhead.
An experienced advisor
Owns the relationship, the interpretation and the quality of the advice.
Modern AI and automation
Help with preparation, organization and repeatable steps. They extend capacity; they do not replace judgment, and their output is reviewed before it is relied on.
Trusted specialists
Brought in when a problem needs focused depth beyond PDW’s own, with clear roles and handoffs.
Your team
Keeps ownership of decisions and operations, and of what the work produces.
05 / Beyond the work
Perspective from
outside the work.
Away from client work, Mike plays tennis, hikes and explores national parks, travels, and tinkers with technology for the enjoyment of seeing how things work.
Time outdoors is where things tend to get clearer. The terrain, waterways and routes behind PDW’s visual language come from the same place.
Tennis
Focus, practice and reading a situation as it develops.
Hiking and national parks
Time outdoors, and the clarity that tends to come with it.
Travel
New places and the perspective they bring.
Tinkering
Building and experimenting with technology and systems, for the curiosity of it.
06 / Credentials
Credentials support
the experience.
They record formal study in the disciplines behind the work. The experience is the story; these are part of how it was built.
- CCRP · Certified Cyber Resilience Professional
- CBCP · Certified Business Continuity Professional
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate
Start with a conversation
Working through a difficult
technology decision?
Start with a conversation. You don’t need a defined project or a finished brief, only the decision in front of you and the context around it.
Talk with PDW