About Foundry4
A technology publication written for the people who have to make British organisations work, and a plain account of what it is, what it is not, and where the money comes from.
An independent publication
Foundry4 is an independent technology publication. It has no connection to any organisation that used this name or this domain before it. No previous owner is involved in this publication, endorses it, or carries any responsibility for what appears here.
Both the name and the registration were out of use by the time the operator of this publication acquired the domain. Nothing written or published by a previous owner is reproduced or continued here.
Some articles sit at addresses that were in use before this publication existed, because other sites still link to them and a working link is better than a dead one. Everything at those addresses is new work, written here, on the subject the address names.
What Foundry4 covers
Eight sections, chosen because between them they cover most of what a British technology decision actually turns on. Machines doing work that people used to do. The software an organisation buys rather than builds. Where that software runs and what the electricity costs. What the organisation knows and whether it can trust its own records. Keeping all of it standing up when somebody attacks it. The programmes that try to change any of the above. What is coming that is not yet real. And the technology British public services run on, which is where the consequences land first and hardest.
Automation gets a hub of its own rather than a scattering of updates, because the question of what it costs once it is live outlasts any particular vendor generation, and our intelligent automation guide holds that argument in one place.
The bias in what gets published is towards things that can be checked. A procurement figure from a published contract award is worth more than a vendor's estimate of a market. A National Audit Office report on a programme that overran is worth more than a prediction about the year ahead. Where a question genuinely has no verified answer, the piece says so and names the body that would have to publish one.
Who it is for
Heads of digital, chief technology officers, and the people running change inside government departments, councils, NHS trusts and mid-sized to large companies. They already know what the acronyms stand for, which is why nothing here explains them, and they are usually reading because a decision is due rather than out of curiosity.
That audience shapes the register. British spelling, British institutions, British regulators and pounds rather than dollars, because a piece about procurement rules that quietly assumes a federal buyer is useless to a county council. Coverage of American and European technology is frequent, since that is where most of the software comes from, but the reader on the other end is assumed to be here.
How it is paid for
At launch, by its operator, and by nothing else. There is no advertising on this site, no paid placement inside articles, no affiliate arrangement and no analytics package watching who reads what. There is also no newsletter, no account to create and no form to fill in, which is why the site asks for nothing about you.
That will not necessarily stay true forever. Sponsored articles and brand partnerships are the likely route to paying for the work, and if either arrives the arrangement will be labelled on the page it appears on, and it will not be written by the desk that covers the sponsor. Nothing of that kind is running today.
Who writes it
Articles carry the publication's name or the name of a desk. There are no personal bylines and no author profiles, because inventing a writer with a biography and a photograph would be a fabrication of exactly the sort the sourcing rules exist to prevent. The editorial guidelines set out how figures are sourced, what happens when one cannot be verified, and how a mistake gets corrected once it is published.
Everything published so far is listed in date order on the insights index. Correspondence, including anything that looks like an error, goes to the addresses on the contact page.