About ThinkCapital
ThinkCapital brings together three decades of institutional research, enterprise advisory, and government technology experience — applied to the most consequential governance challenge of our era.
Founder
ThinkCapital was founded by Michael Bragen, whose career in IT strategy research and advisory spans three decades of work across North America, EMEA, and Asia Pacific. His work has centered on a consistent theme: bringing measurement discipline to technology investment and governance decisions that are too often made on assumption rather than evidence.
That foundation was built through sustained engagement with the major institutions that shaped enterprise IT research and practice, and through fieldwork across government agencies, financial institutions, and technology organizations worldwide. ThinkCapital is the expression of that accumulated perspective, applied to AI governance.
Institutional Affiliations
ThinkCapital's analytical approach has been shaped by research and advisory relationships with leading institutions across the industry analyst, management consulting, and academic publishing communities, including:
Dataquest, Frost & Sullivan, Gartner, IDC, The Yankee Group — research and advisory work spanning technology adoption, market analysis, and IT investment frameworks across global markets.
Computer Aid, Inc., Nolan Norton (now KPMG), and Software Productivity Research (founded by Capers Jones) — spanning IT strategy, alliance development, and the empirical measurement of software quality and productivity that forms the methodological core of ThinkCapital's work.
COSMIC, IFPUG, the IT Metrics and Productivity Institute (ITMPI), and the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University — contributing to practitioner education, measurement standards development, and the empirical literature on software engineering and IT governance.
Taylor & Francis and direct advisory engagement with federal agencies, state and local governments, and major enterprise organizations across defense, civilian, regulatory, and financial services contexts.
Areas of Expertise
Research focused on how AI governance requirements translate into operational practice in government contexts, with particular attention to measurement, accountability, and human oversight.
Systematic assessment methodologies developed through global enterprise engagements, applied to technology investment decisions, organizational readiness, and comparative performance analysis.
Application of Schelling-Granovetter threshold modeling to technology adoption in government contexts, explaining why identical initiatives succeed in some agencies and stall in others.
Published work on function point analysis, software quality metrics, and IT productivity measurement, contributing to both practitioner literature and international standards development.
ThinkCapital's credibility rests on a simple proposition: that the measurement discipline developed in software engineering over three decades applies directly to the governance of artificial intelligence, and that government agencies deserve advisory services grounded in that discipline rather than in vendor positioning or policy advocacy.
