About

This site is where I write up what I am working on, at the point where business architecture meets applied AI.

Those two fields talk past each other more often than not. Business architects have spent decades building disciplined ways to describe what an organisation is — its capabilities, information objects, value streams, the ownership behind them. That work was mostly read by people. Meanwhile, systems are appearing that need the same descriptions in a form they can act on, and they are being built largely without reference to that tradition.

I find the gap between the two more interesting than either side on its own. Most of what I write here comes from that seam: ontologies and semantic layers, machine-readable business semantics, governance of definitions, and what agentic systems actually require from an organisation before they can be trusted with anything.

What you will find here

Working notes and longer arguments, written when I have understood something well enough to defend it. Some pieces correct things I read elsewhere; some work through a problem I have run into; a few are closer to essays. What they have in common is that they are about the substance, not about a product, and not about me.

Where a piece is backed by more formal work, the paper is published separately as a PDF with a DOI through Zenodo, and any artefacts — models, ontologies, code — go on GitHub. The post here is written on its own terms rather than generated from the paper. They serve different readers.

I write in English because the conversation I want to be part of happens in English, even though it is not my first language.

Where this comes from

I started in Luxembourg in the late 1980s, in securities and treasury operations at WestLB International and DG Bank — teams of fifteen, then sixty. Seven years of that teaches you what separates a good back-office process from a bad one, and how long it usually takes for anyone above the process to find out.

In 1995 I founded Forwe Consulting and spent twenty-three years working with banks, leasing companies and insurers. Later I led large programmes as an Associate Partner at Consileon and as Managing Director of FINIUS. In 2026 I founded ClearFlow Advisory.

The combination I keep returning to is business architecture management, business services and the theory of constraints, on a foundation of systems theory. Most organisations already have the people, the systems and the will. What is usually missing is the ability to release what is there — and that turns out to depend a great deal on how the organisation is described, not only on how it is run. Which is roughly where this site begins.

Independence

I work as a consultant. That work lives at clearflow-advisory.de and is deliberately kept off this site: nothing here is a pitch, no client work is described, and no post exists to generate an enquiry. If a piece touches a vendor or a product, I have no commercial relationship with them unless it says so explicitly.

The separation is for my benefit as much as yours. Writing that has to sell something stops being useful quite quickly.

Contact

Corrections and disagreement are welcome, and more useful to me than agreement. Write to hello@forwe.ai or find me on LinkedIn.

A note on this site

It runs on self-hosted Ghost. It sets no cookies, loads nothing from third parties, and runs no analytics — I do not know who reads this, and that is fine. Server logs are kept for 14 days. Details are in the privacy notice.