Hi, I’m Luke.

UK based. Fifteen plus years in business automation and process architecture, mostly on the software vendor side, with stints on the services side too.

The short version

I’ve spent my career where the craft gets sharpened: process modelling and architecture at IDS Scheer and Software AG, cloud and middleware at Red Hat (acquired by IBM), and RPA, process mining and agentic AI at UiPath. Together they cover most of the toolkit modern automation actually runs on.

Real automation rarely sits in one stack. Most of my work has meant partnering closely with the hyperscalers, principally Microsoft Azure and AWS, alongside Google Cloud, IBM Cloud and Oracle Cloud where the client estate demanded it.

Alongside that, I’ve spent time at leading services firms putting these capabilities to work inside real transformation programmes, with banks, telcos and public sector organisations across the UK, Europe and Australia.

How I got here: three hats, one golden thread (automation at the core)

Every layer of automation I now work with, I first learned by building it, bringing it together, and selling it. In that order. That order matters.

I started as a Java developer, the how. I built things that ran in production: client-customised UIs for the Gartner-leading software from the companies I worked for, plus the workflows and underlying integrations I designed and deployed. Alongside that I created process-driven solutions including analytics, reporting, automated process testing and more. On some builds I ran the whole arc myself and even developed new resellable offerings for our sales team, from MVP concept and business case, source code and dev work, through to the marketing and sales that took it to clients. This is where I saw automation’s inner workings: not the brochure version, but how it actually behaves when real data and real users hit it.

Then into architecture, the what and the why. The people, process and technology view. TOGAF, process and data at the centre. Business design workshops, whiteboard sessions, strategy and process modelling, blueprinting, SAP process work. I designed target architectures, capability models and customer journeys with more than twenty clients, consulted across SAP upgrade programmes, and stood up architecture competency centres so the capability stuck after I left. Knowing how things are built, I could now decide what to build and why, connecting what the business actually needs to what the technology can actually do.

Then into presales and technical selling, bringing it all together. Translating the how, the what and the why into solutions clients would buy and teams could deliver. I owned bids end to end, from qualification and demonstrations through to proposals and the architecture decisions sitting underneath them. At Red Hat I drove cloud and middleware adoption across the big Australian banks, growing strategic-product revenue year on year. At UiPath I worked with clients to find automation opportunities at scale, including a healthcare programme that freed up hundreds of front-line clinical hours in a single month. By here, I could stand in front of business leadership and a build team in the same afternoon and be credible to both.

Which brings me to now.

Agentic AI is the next layer of automation, and I didn’t arrive at it as a prompt specialist who discovered the field last year. I arrived through fifteen years of building, architecting and deploying the automation it sits on top of. I know what’s underneath the demo, because I’ve shipped it. I know why a process is shaped the way it is, because I’ve modelled it with the people who run it. And I know how to take something from concept to client, because I’ve done that arc end to end.

What genuinely pulls me in is this: for the first time, the software can reason about the process, not just execute it. I spent years mapping how work actually flows, then automating it step by painstaking step. Agents change the shape of that problem, and having seen the inner workings from every angle, I can’t not build with them. Agentic AI isn’t a reinvention for me. It’s where the whole thread has been heading.

What I write about

• Business. Operating models, where automation actually pays back, scoping transformation without burning the team out.
• Tech. Patterns, tools and trade-offs across RPA, agentic AI, integration and middleware. Working code where it earns its place.
• Shorts. One-minute reads. A slide as the hero, a few paragraphs of argument. The blog equivalent of YouTube Shorts.

Currently building

A primary Golden Passport site and a small set of product MVPs, hosted separately. This blog is the front door, and a public record of how the thinking evolves.

References

1. BPMN specification (OMG). Backs the “BPMN contributor” claim on IDS Scheer AG. https://www.omg.org/spec/BPMN
2. webMethods on Wikipedia. Backs the “home of webMethods” framing on Software AG: platform history and acquisition timeline. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebMethods
3. jBPM project. Backs the open-source workflow claim on Red Hat. https://www.jbpm.org/
4. UiPath, Gartner Magic Quadrant for Robotic Process Automation. Backs the “RPA leader” framing on the UiPath tile. https://www.uipath.com/resources/automation-analyst-reports/gartner-magic-quadrant-robotic-process-automation
5. UiPath on Wikipedia. Backs the “helped evangelise RPA and the early software robots” framing: company history and product origins. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UiPath