Start with a mirror

The first step of the method is to mirror. Own a copy of your data, in a database you control, fed from the tools you rent. It replaces nothing and risks nothing, and your agent can already answer questions across all your tools at once.

The question that says when

Here is the last row of the rent-or-own check: if the vendor vanished tomorrow, could you keep working? If the answer is no, at least mirror your data now. You don’t have to leave anything to do it. You’re only making sure that you could.

Where the idea comes from

AaSS (Agent as Software Solution) starts from Alex G.’s own path. PilotLink, his software for marine pilotage, is built on one conviction: no lock-in to a vendor. That conviction is the personal root of the method.

Inside PilotLink, Alex G. realized he had built a mirror of the database, one that can help create anything in the software. The mirror idea became the first step, so that anyone can take it.

Data alone is not enough

A copy of your data is a start. Whoever owns the data, the code and the process owns your business’s future, and data alone is not enough: an export without the rules and steps that give it meaning is a pile of rows. So a good mirror keeps two things together: the data, and what gives it meaning.

Take-home

1. List the tools whose data you’d most want a copy of.
2. For each one, write down what “a copy” would need to include: the data, and what gives it meaning (the rules and steps around it).