Author: Vogel Consulting LLC
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Over the last three weekends, my wife and I celebrated our birthdays and our anniversary. We are also in the third season of the year, autumn, with September, October, and November marking the transition from summer to winter, and we have now put three business quarters of 2026 behind us. Adding to the theme, I…
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On October 1, 2025, I launched Vogel Consulting. I had spent more than 30 years working with ERP systems, IBM i, business processes, integrations, and the technology that supports day-to-day operations. I knew the kind of work I wanted to do, and I had an idea of the kind of consultant I wanted to be.…
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A client recently came back to me with a question about something that had come up during an earlier meeting. My first thought was that I needed to go back and look at the meeting where this started. Not because I was trying to figure out how to justify additional work, but because I wanted…
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One of the things I have been thinking about lately is what happens when experience, new technology, and the next generation of technology professionals come together. That thought has come up several times over the past few days. Interestingly, artificial intelligence has been part of both conversations. I wrote recently about my growing use of…
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Sometimes it takes a change in perspective to see something that was there all along. Today, August 25, 2026, marks one year since I filed the paperwork with the North Dakota Secretary of State to form Vogel Consulting LLC. The filing was approved on August 28, 2025, and I officially launched the business on October…
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It has been a little over two months since my last post here. Two months does not sound like much on a calendar. But this stretch held more living, more loss, and more clarity than some years do. I want to walk through it because I think the thread running through these experiences matters more…
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Let me set the scene. It is June 10th. I have just purchased IBM Bob Pro — a $16/month subscription — to support my consulting work. Simple enough, right? Except within minutes, I cannot log in. The system tells me my account is not provisioned. I opened a support case with IBM. And what follows…
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I have been hearing that the AS/400 is obsolete since Y2K. Back then, everyone was talking about abandoning it for the next big thing — new platforms, new frameworks, new acronyms. Yet somehow, the so-called “obsolete” machine kept quietly running businesses all over the world. I did not jump ship. I kept sailing. Today it…
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National Small Business Week runs May 3–9 this year, and I will be honest with you: I almost let it pass without saying anything. I am in my first year of running Vogel Consulting LLC. I do not have a team of employees to showcase across social media. I do not have a storefront with…
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“What do you mean you have not learned the new debugging tool?” If you have been coding since the dinosaurs roamed the earth… well, yes—some of us have. And technically, birds are modern-day dinosaurs. With a last name like Vogel (which literally means “bird” in German), I have made more than a few jokes about…