The thesis
Technology is not a cost to be managed down. It is capital to be allocated with discipline.
Most organizations make technology decisions reactively, tool by tool, vendor by vendor, project by project. The companies that compound allocate technology spend the way they allocate any capital: against a thesis, with a return in mind, and under governance that holds. JMA exists to bring that discipline to executive teams and boards. We are paid by our clients, never by the vendors whose tools we may recommend.
How we work
We hold ourselves to a different standard than traditional consulting firms.
Five commitments define every engagement.
Confidentiality is non-negotiable.
For engagements to succeed, clients must share strengths, weaknesses, and aspirations openly. That candor is only possible when trust is absolute. We do not publish a client logo wall. References are available on request.
We never ask the same question twice.
Knowledge from every engagement is captured in The JMA Ledger and carried forward, so the relationship compounds rather than restarts. The work you do with us today does not have to be done again tomorrow.
Built for you, not for a template.
Every engagement is shaped to the client's business, leadership, and the decisions in front of them. The method holds; the application is built for you.
We are invested in the outcome, not the deliverable.
Strategy without execution is theater. We define what success looks like with our clients, establish how it will be measured, and stay through implementation. The engagement ends when the outcome is delivered, not when the deck is presented.
Built to leave capability behind, not dependency.
The practices, the governance, and the discipline stay with your organization after the work ends. We work to make the next decision yours to make, with the muscle to make it well, long after JMA is gone.
What we do
Every engagement works down a single chain.
The outcome defines the business capabilities, the business capabilities define the technology capabilities, and only then does the technology itself come into view. The discipline is in working top-down rather than starting from the technology.
Outcomes
The work begins with the outcome the executive team is trying to achieve. Revenue, cost, risk, resilience, or the strategic shift the business is making. We name it in business terms and define how success will be measured before any other decision is made.
Business capabilities
Every outcome depends on the business being able to do certain things, sell in a new channel, serve a new segment, close the books faster, respond to a shock. A capability is more than software. It is the process that runs it, the people who own it, the data that feeds it, the decisions it enables, and the readiness of the organization to operate it. We identify the capabilities the outcome requires, assess each one honestly across all of those dimensions, and name where the business must strengthen.
Technology capabilities
Each business capability depends on the technology environment being able to do certain things, capture, integrate, decide, secure, govern, operate, and sustain. We define those technology capabilities against the business need, not against a vendor's product map.
Technology
Only at this point do we choose technology, and we mean technology broadly: software and hardware, the services and support that surround them, whether they live inside the enterprise or are delivered from outside. With the prior work in hand, the selection question is sharper, the criteria are real, and the recommendation is independent.
We evaluate every technology decision against two disciplines: the total cost of owning it, not the price of acquiring it, license and hardware, integration and implementation, operations and support, training and change, and eventual replacement, and the benefits it must deliver, defined in business terms at the start of the work and tracked until they are realized.
The technology serves the capability; the capability serves the outcome.
Two disciplines we bring across the chain.
Both can sit inside a larger engagement or stand on their own.
Strategic sourcing & RFP execution
Vendor selection and contracting run as a capital discipline: rigorous criteria, structured negotiation, and contracting that aligns price, performance, and exit from day one. We are paid by our clients alone and hold no resale agreements with the vendors we evaluate.
Software & services optimization
For technology already in place, we evaluate what is earning its keep and what is not. The lens is the same: total cost of ownership against the business outcome it serves, with a plan to retire, renegotiate, or consolidate what is leaking value.
The DAAEG™ Framework
Treat technology like capital, not cost.
Most organizations make technology decisions reactively. DAAEG brings the discipline of capital allocation to every technology investment, across five stages.
Define
Establish strategic intent before investing.
Assess
Audit current state, waste, and risk.
Align
Map initiatives to business outcomes.
Execute
Deliver with measurable discipline.
Govern
Realize the benefits, sustain value, close the loop.
AI strategy, done responsibly
We help you prepare for AI, embed it in our recommendations, and practice what we preach.
AI is reshaping how organizations operate, compete, and allocate capital. We help executive teams cut through the noise, separating durable advantage from expensive distraction. Our work covers three fronts.
Prepare
Our AI Awareness and Change Management Program builds the foundation most organizations skip. Through facilitated sessions and our proprietary Awareness Check methodology, we address the people problem before the technology problem, including AI Backwash™, the unintended exposure of company data through everyday AI use.
Embed
Where AI genuinely improves outcomes, we build it into our recommendations and roadmaps. Every AI recommendation is grounded in a business case, a governance plan, and a measurable outcome, not buzzwords.
Practice
We use AI inside our own practice every day, always with a human in the loop. The JMA Ledger, our governed knowledge system, is AI-augmented and senior-supervised. We do not recommend an approach to AI we have not pressure-tested on ourselves first.
Our AI practice is led by Kushal Raju, Head of AI Strategy & Solutions. Learn about our AI Awareness Program →
The principals
Senior judgment from both sides of the capital equation.
Every JMA engagement is led by principal and senior consultants who own the strategy, design, and oversight of your work.
Harrison Lewis
Before founding JMA, Harrison spent more than two decades inside HEB, Kroger, and Lowe's, running operations, supply chain, pricing, and e-commerce, and served three times as a chief information officer, including at Haggen Food & Pharmacy and Northgate González Market. He brings the perspective of someone who has sat in the chair, made the calls, and lived with the consequences.
LinkedIn →
Ashwani Kumar
Ashwani leads how JMA's strategy gets executed. An enterprise architect with more than twenty years delivering large transformation programs, he works directly with CXOs across retail, healthcare, and financial services on programs judged by operational efficiency, compliance, and revenue, not by implementation milestones.
LinkedIn →
Janet Peterson
Janet leads JMA's finance and accounting transformation work. She helps executives turn financial data into decisions and build the controls and reporting discipline that keep a growing business in command of its numbers.
Her perspective comes from more than two decades advising private companies on the practical side of finance: financial statement preparation, GAAP, and Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, paired with a teaching practice in accounting and finance at the college level.
Janet holds an MBA in Finance from NYU's Stern School of Business, where she was a Stern Scholar, and a BS in Accounting from Providence College, earned magna cum laude.
LinkedIn →Proof of outcomes
Confidential by design. Measurable by intent.
We do not publish client logos. We publish outcomes.
Reduced stack overlap.
Eliminated redundant platforms, improving cost efficiency across the technology portfolio.
Simplified integration architecture.
Accelerated delivery timelines by reducing the integration surface that programs ran against.
Improved order accuracy.
Reduced manual processes across systems and lifted order accuracy in a multi-channel business.
Take the first step
Every organization has opportunities to improve performance.
The first step is identifying where technology can deliver measurable business impact. Reach us directly, or schedule time on the calendar.