A field journal by Phillip Büchler

Forged in the
fires of
Enterprise IT.

Microsoft security, the modern workplace, endpoint management, and the leadership questions that come with all of it. Written for people who run IT in Swiss organisations, including the regulated ones.

Latest writing

all 181 posts in the archive

A translucent blue tentacle signs a typed letter with a fountain pen, with a vintage typewriter and an open laptop in the background.

11 November 20263 min read

Judge the signature, not the tool

Using AI to write isn't a loss of professional pride. What counts is who reads, owns and signs the text.

A stag in a tweed suit and monocle sits at an oak desk, using tweezers to place link cards into an open album, with a fireplace, bookshelves, a green banker's lamp, a teacup and a pocket watch around him.

6 November 202610 min read

Weekend Reader Week 45

Conditional Access changes, risky Entra defaults, AI in cyber security and a few good reads from the week.

Watercolour sketches of a heron, a hawk, a magpie, a sheepdog and a tortoise in an open field notebook, with binoculars and a pencil on a wooden desk.

2 November 20266 min read

A Field Guide to Enterprise IT

A naturalist's guide to the species you meet in enterprise IT. You'll probably recognise a few colleagues, and maybe yourself.

Isometric miniature town where one district is divided by stone walls into separate courtyards. Guards with tablets check passes at the doors of buildings marked with purple tags, a red drone sits trapped in one empty courtyard, and the rest of the town stays open behind.

1 November 20267 min read

Decide the Tier, Not the Exception

Hardening stalls when it's one setting for everyone. Tier it by user group, start from a benchmark, and decide the trade-offs once per group instead of once per request.

Isometric town at its entrance, where a medic holds up a large ring of keys next to a delivery van full of parcels while a second medic checks a parcel on a tablet.

31 October 202611 min read

Who Holds the Keys to Your Patching?

Third-party patching tools are tier-0 assets. A look at the permissions they ask for, and the ones I wouldn't grant.

Isometric miniature town of software buildings on a cliff above the clouds, where medics in teal coats carry glowing parcels between buildings marked with coloured tags, red drones sit on a few roofs, and three cleared plots stand empty.

27 October 202614 min read

Patch Less

AI finds and exploits vulnerabilities faster than most patch processes can follow. Why consolidation and tiering help more than faster packaging.

Four exhausted men, one supporting a limping colleague, walk out of a sandy arena littered with sticky notes, broken mugs and torn flipcharts, while a silverback gorilla sits calmly behind them with a sticky note on his shoulder

22 October 20266 min read

Knowing When to Stop

Programmes plan themselves well. The single topic inside rarely has a definition of done, neither for the thinking nor for the people doing it.

Three men at a wooden arena gate push a fourth man in an olive shirt forward toward a silverback gorilla waiting with crossed arms, while a crowd of office workers queues behind them

21 October 20265 min read

Who Goes First

Large programmes need two kinds of courage: going first and holding on. The usual volunteering pattern spends both in the first phase.

A silverback gorilla waits with crossed arms in a meeting room while four men argue over a whiteboard full of diagrams

20 October 20265 min read

100 Men and a Gorilla

A ridiculous internet debate turns out to be a good place to practise thinking. Taking a question apart is easy. Deciding how far to go, and who should do it, is a leadership problem.

Glass office tower with finished, lit upper floors and a crane on top, while the lower floors and entrance are still wrapped in scaffolding.

9 October 20262 min read

The workplace leader’s two horizons

Workplace leaders are asked to shape an AI-enabled future while keeping meetings, access and support working today. Neither horizon can be dropped.

Person at a desk on one cliff edge, a rope bridge to the opposite cliff crowded with speech bubbles labelled Copilot, AI Platform, Governance and Model Wars

29 September 20265 min read

The AI Adoption Chasm

Individual AI use is easy to show and easy to measure. Enterprise value only appears when people stop acting as the translation layer between systems.

Forged in thefires ofEnterprise IT.

Latest writing

Forged in the
fires of
Enterprise IT.