IBM Distinguished Engineer. DB2 co-developer. Cambridge engineer. Now working for companies your size.
40+
years in data management
130+
patents held
$50M–$2B
client revenue range
3
FRACTIONAL CHIEF DATA OFFICER ADVISORY
Strategy that survives contact with your data.
Perigee gives mid-market companies a Chief Data Officer on a fractional basis, and an agency arm that puts AI agents to work in the business. Forty years of building data platforms, pointed at the decisions in front of you now.
- Thirty minutes. No deck.
THE PROBLEM
The tools were never the problem.
Mid-market companies buy the platform before they define the decision. A warehouse gets migrated, a catalog gets licensed, a model gets fine-tuned, and eighteen months later the same executive asks the same question and gets three different answers from three different reports.
That is not a technology failure. It is a failure of ownership, sequence, and evidence. Nobody owns the definition of the metric. Nobody sequenced the work against a business outcome. Nobody measured whether the thing that shipped moved anything.
Perigee is built to fix that in two directions. The Fractional CDO line puts senior data and AI leadership inside the company for as long as the hard decisions last. The Agency line builds and runs the AI agents that do the work those decisions call for.
SERVICE LINE 01
Fractional CDO
You do not need a full-time Chief Data Officer. You need one for the eighteen months where the decisions get made.
A full-time CDO runs $350,000 to $500,000 loaded, takes six months to hire, and spends the first quarter learning your business. Most companies between $50M and $2B need the judgment, not the headcount.
I work as your Chief Data Officer two to four days a week. I set the strategy, stand up the governance, sit in the executive meetings where data and AI budgets get decided, and hold the roadmap accountable in the weeks between visits. Your team does the building. I make sure they are building the right thing in the right order.
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Data & AI Strategy
Technology selection before problem definition is the most expensive mistake in this field. I start from the decisions your business cannot make today and work backward to the data required to make them.
AI strategy is data strategy with a shorter fuse. Model selection is the easy part. The hard part is the data supply chain feeding the model, the controls wrapped around it, and an honest answer about which use cases are actually ready and which are a demo.
- A current-state map of the data estate: systems, flows, owners, and the gaps between them
- A use case portfolio scored on business value and delivery feasibility, AI and analytics on the same scale
- A target operating model with named roles, not boxes on a chart
- A sequenced 12 to 24 month roadmap with cost, dependency, and decision points
- The business case written in the language the CFO already uses
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Data & AI Governance
Governance fails when it is written as policy and delivered as paperwork. It works when it is a short set of decisions someone owns, with evidence attached and a date on it.
AI governance is the same discipline under more scrutiny. A model inventory nobody maintains is worse than no inventory, because it tells your auditor you knew.
- A domain and ownership model with RACI resolved down to the named steward
- Data quality rules with measured thresholds, remediation paths, and a weekly KPI nobody has to chase
- Metadata, catalog, and lineage that survive the next platform change
- A policy set mapped to the regulations that actually apply to you: GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA, GLBA, SOX
- AI governance covering model inventory, use case intake and approval, human oversight, and model risk, mapped to the NIST AI RMF and the EU AI Act where it reaches you
- A CMMI-based maturity baseline and a rescore cadence, so progress is a number and not an opinion
Engagement shapes
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Assessment
A data and AI readiness baseline scored against CMMI, prioritized findings, and a board-ready roadmap. Ends with a decision, not a deck.
4 to 6 weeks
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Fractional CDO retainer
Two to four days a month as your acting Chief Data Officer. Executive presence, roadmap ownership, and governance that runs when I am not in the room.
6 to 18 months
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Program rescue
A stalled governance, MDM, or AI program taken from stuck to working. Scoped after a two-week diagnostic, priced fixed.
Fixed scope
SERVICE LINE 02
Agency
Most businesses do not have a data problem in the abstract. They have a phone ringing at 7pm that nobody answers.
Holler 24/7 is Perigee's agency practice. We build and run AI agents that do work a business is currently losing: answering the phone after hours, qualifying the caller, booking the job on the calendar, and following up by text before the lead goes cold.
For a home services company, one missed call is a job worth several hundred to several thousand dollars. The standard answers are a call center that does not know your pricing, or a voicemail box that books nothing. A trained voice agent answers on the first ring, every hour, knows your service area and your price bands, and puts the appointment in your CRM before the call ends.
We are an AI-first shop, not a local answering service with a chatbot bolted on. The agent is built for your business, tested against your real call patterns, and measured on jobs booked.
How it is priced: Setup is priced against your average customer value. The monthly fee is a fraction of one booked job. You choose usage buckets for voice, SMS, and conversational AI at signup, and you choose metered or unified billing at checkout.
Who it is for: Home services and local service businesses in the Oklahoma City metro and State. The same build applies anywhere a missed conversation is a lost sale.
What we deliver
support_agent
A voice agent trained on your services, price bands, service area, hours, and escalation rules
call
Inbound call answering, qualification, and booking, around the clock
sms
SMS follow-up and conversational AI running on the same thread as the call
storage
Your own CRM sub-account, provisioned from a proven configuration rather than built from blank
rocket_launch
Onboarding automated end to end: payment, number forwarding or porting, and CRM setup
monitoring
Reporting on calls answered, jobs booked, and revenue attributed to the agent
HOW ENGAGEMENTS RUN
Five steps. No mystery.
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01
Diagnostic
Thirty minutes on a call. You describe what is not working. I tell you whether Perigee is the right fix, including when the answer is no.
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02
Baseline
We measure where you actually are. CMMI scoring for a data or AI estate, a call capture audit for an agency engagement. Everything after this is measured against this number.
route
03
Plan
A sequenced plan with cost, dependency, and a named owner on every line. Short enough that your executives read it.
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04
Run
Two to four days per week for a fractional CDO engagement, or a managed agent for an agency engagement. Weekly KPIs either way.
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05
Handover
An internal owner who can carry it, documentation they will actually open, and a rescore against the baseline. The engagement ends on purpose.
WHO YOU WORK WITH
Richard Muirhead
I spent thirty-one years at IBM, ending as a Distinguished Engineer and Practice CTO. I co-developed DB2 and worked on the Galileo flight reservation system when that system was the hard problem in the industry. I hold more than 130 patents and sat in the IBM Academy of Technology.
After IBM I ran enterprise architecture at Majesco, founded two companies, and spent eight years as US Head of Data Management at UST, where I was accountable for data governance and MDM delivery across the American client base. I left in 2025 to build Perigee.
I read engineering at Jesus College, Cambridge. I hold CDMP, DCAM, PMP, TOGAF 9 Chief Architect, and CMMI certifications. I sit on the boards of two Bay Area AI startups, and I publish TheModernCDO on data and AI leadership.
Perigee is deliberately small. When you engage Perigee, I am the one in the room.
FAQ
Questions, answered plainly.
A consultant produces a recommendation and leaves. A fractional CDO owns the outcome. I sit in your leadership meetings, I answer to your CEO or CFO on the roadmap, and my name is on the governance decisions. The engagement is scoped to end, but while it runs, the accountability is real.
Two to four days a month on a standard retainer, structured as a mix of scheduled executive sessions, working time with your team, and asynchronous review. Assessments run heavier over a shorter window.
No. Most of my work starts after a platform purchase. The order of operations was wrong, but the license is not the problem. We define the decisions, sequence the work against them, and get value out of what you already own before spending anything else.
They share a method and nothing else. The Fractional CDO line is senior advisory for companies between $50M and $2B. Holler247 builds and runs AI agents for service businesses. If you came for one, you will not be sold the other.
Assessments are fixed price against a defined scope. Retainers are monthly and sized to the days committed. Agency pricing is anchored to your average customer value. Every number is on the table in the first call, and I will tell you if the work is not worth what it costs.
Tell me what is not working.
Thirty minutes, no deck, no pitch sequence. If Perigee is not the right fix, I will say so on the call and point you somewhere better.