DCCO is a solo practice — which means every engagement has a senior, experienced consultant on it from day one, because there is only one consultant.
DCCO's founder has been working in technology for over thirty-seven years, beginning in broadcast and progressing through AV, IT infrastructure, video communication, digital signage, DOOH, and most recently AI. That career spans vendor-side and client-side roles, large programmes and small ones, and a wide range of sectors — theatre and entertainment, media, retail, banking, aviation, and more.
DCCO was established in 2009 on a simple premise: there is a shortage of genuinely independent expertise in these industries. Plenty of suppliers will tell you what to buy. Far fewer people will sit with you, understand your actual problem, and tell you honestly what to do about it — including when the honest answer is to spend less, do less, or wait.
Every engagement starts with listening. Time is spent understanding the business, not just the technical problem. Technology decisions almost always have a business context that matters more than the technology itself — and getting that context right is the difference between advice that works and advice that looks good on paper.
Deliverables are clear and specific: findings documents, specifications, risk assessments, project plans. Not generic templates with your name on them — documents that reflect your situation and are useful to the people who have to act on them.
Most work happens on client sites or inside their systems. DCCO goes to where the work is happening rather than managing by video call.
DCCO has been involved in software development throughout its practice, though not as a developer. The role is architectural: designing systems, defining how components should interact, and producing specifications that engineers can build from. The distinction matters — the capability is to understand what software can and cannot do, evaluate a proposed architecture critically, and produce a specification that a development team can act on, without writing production code.
AI work follows the same pattern. AI tools are used every day; systems at the boundary of what is currently possible are explored regularly; and the working understanding of how these systems behave goes well beyond the vendor pitch. When advising on AI adoption, the basis is practical experience, not a certification.
One particularly productive area is the design of AI agents as complete characters rather than simple roles. A persona — with a defined knowledge base, working style, priorities, and even a relationship with uncertainty — performs very differently from an agent that has simply been given a job description. This approach produces more consistent, more reliable, and more useful AI behaviour, and it applies equally to service management agents, data analysis pipelines, and automated decision support.
DCCO's primary market is small and medium enterprises. These businesses typically have real technology problems — investments to make, systems to manage, transformations to navigate — but without the in-house expertise to do it independently, and without the budget or appetite for a large consulting firm.
What DCCO offers is senior expertise at a scale that makes sense for an SME — across strategy, project delivery, and the technology decisions that sit underneath both. The same quality of thinking that a large organisation pays a lot of money for, without the overhead of a practice that needs to justify its headcount.
AI adoption is a particular area of focus for SMEs. There is a great deal of noise in this space, and a great deal of pressure to do something before you understand what. Thirty-seven years of experience evaluating technology — combined with genuine, daily working knowledge of what these tools actually do — is genuinely useful to a business that wants to make a sensible decision rather than a fashionable one.
DCCO is not an aggressive sales operation, and there is no expectation that the people who make contact are confident technology buyers. If you have a problem that might be relevant to what DCCO does, send an email. Describe what you are dealing with. The response will be honest about whether it is something DCCO can help with — and if not, you will be pointed towards someone who can.
There is no obligation attached to an initial conversation. Follow-up is not aggressive. If the timing is wrong or the fit is not right, that is fine — come back when it is.