Our Clients
Mid-Sized on Main Street
IDS works best with organizations that have meaningful operational data, can see the AI opportunity, and are done with vendors who split strategy from execution.
We work in sectors where the operational data is rich and the engineering team is absent.
Is This You?
You can see AI reshaping your industry, not just your back office, and you're asking where to start.
You're somewhere between 25 and 500 people.
You have limited in-house engineering, you're not ready to hire a full technology team, but you need access to one.
You want guidance on both the strategy and the technology. You want someone in your corner, not a vendor taking orders.
You're looking for a long-term partner, not a project that ends with a deliverable.
You have no CTO and no CISO. Technology is handled by IT, or by the CFO, or by the COO.
Big enough that the spreadsheets have stopped working. Small enough that hiring a CTO, a data team and a security lead isn't a serious option.
Before IDS
The Old Way of Doing It
Every leader of a mid-sized company with no in-house engineering team works through the same four options. IDS has watched all four up close.
Hire a consulting firm.
You get a strategy. You do not get anything built. The deck is often correct and almost always undeliverable, because the people who wrote it have never had to implement one.
Hire a development shop.
They will build precisely what you specify. The problem is that specifying it was the hard part. Now you are the architect, making technical decisions you have no way to evaluate, for a team that will hand you a codebase and leave.
Hire a full-time CTO.
A six-figure commitment, a long search, and at the end of it a senior technologist with no engineering team underneath them. A CTO without engineers is an expensive person writing memos.
Do nothing.
Entirely rational while the question is unclear. It stops being rational once the industry has answered it for you.
None of these is a bad option. They are the wrong shape. Each one solves a quarter of the problem and hands you the remaining three.
The natural next question is what the right shape looks like. See what IDS concluded in Our Four-Pillar Philosophy
The Bigger Picture
Eighty Percent of the Economy Is Not a Technology Company
The firms that make up most of Canada's economic activity do not look like the companies technology is built for.
They are substantial businesses, with hundreds of employees, decades of accumulated judgment and balance sheets that would surprise you. And almost none of them have a single software engineer.
So when the ground moves under an industry, as it is moving now with AI, they are the least equipped to respond. Until now, the capability to respond has not been available at a price or in a shape that made sense.
- They pour
- asphalt
- They build
- truck bodies
- They underwrite
- specialty insurance
- They move
- freight
- They process
- food
- They assess
- property
- They run
- mines
If That Sounds Like You, Let's Talk.
Thirty minutes is usually enough for both of us to know whether there's a fit. No preparation and no commitment. Bring your data challenges and we'll tell you honestly whether we can help.