I am Agron Fazliu, an independent technology adviser. I have held responsibility across C-level technology leadership, information security and risk, data, systems and decisions about budgets, suppliers and change that connect those disciplines. My work has included confidentiality-sensitive professional environments where technology choices must respect the obligations surrounding the information.
Those responsibilities matter together. A platform can be technically sound and still be wrong for the organisation. A security measure can be correct in isolation and still make an essential process unworkable. A promising AI product can arrive before the records and controls needed to use it responsibly. My work is to bring those views together before a decision is made.
I focus on confidential, long-lived operating environments: particularly fiduciary businesses, family offices and the advisers around private wealth. The important questions are usually practical. Can information be trusted? Is access appropriate? Can a provider be replaced? Can the organisation continue when people or systems change? Will the decision still make sense in two years?
A conversation about replacing software is often really about control of information, an expensive dependency or an unclear operating responsibility. Establishing that distinction prevents the wrong programme from starting.
I prefer the actual contract, access model, recovery test, cost picture and workflow to a confident summary. Where evidence is incomplete, I say so.
Sometimes a focused review is sufficient. Sometimes a decision should be deferred until the organisation is ready. The scope should follow the decision, not the other way around.
Lawyers, trustees, accountants, investment advisers and specialist protection providers retain responsibility for their disciplines. Technology advice should make their work more dependable, not pretend to replace it.
I have held the Chief Information Officer role, following responsibility for information security and IT risk. Earlier roles included leadership of DevOps, data science and security, and product and technology direction. Across those positions, the work involved the less visible part of executive technology: decisions about people, suppliers, budgets, operations, risk, architecture and delivery.
That is the basis of my fractional CIO and CTO work today. I can join a board or executive conversation without treating it as detached from what engineers and operators will actually have to do afterwards.
Business Analytics.
Data Communication Networks and Distributed Systems.
Computer Science.
European data protection law: what personal information may be collected, kept, and used for what.
Coordinating many teams so they deliver towards one outcome rather than ten.
Building the pipelines that make data usable, and the models that learn from it.
A structured method for running projects, common in government and regulated work.
Shipping software changes often, without breaking what is already running.
Deciding what a product team builds next, and why that before the rest.
The international standard for managing information security, and how to audit an organisation against it.
Running Linux servers, the operating system most of the internet sits on.
Finding the gaps in a system by testing it the way an attacker would.
The same ground, certified independently of any one vendor.
A team award for the master's group project, built with one of Europe's largest internet exchanges. Exchanges had each been building monitoring toolkits fitted to their own infrastructure, so none could use another's. Instrumenting a network at that scale without disturbing what is being measured turned out to be the interesting half.
The group reportThe UK government's international scholarship programme, funded by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.
On AI, machine learning, how organisations really work, and why data misleads people who trust it.
Read the writingMy 2018 work on organisational network analysis was cited in an Institute for Defense Analyses study examining AI in defence acquisition.
The studyOn building a national internet exchange.
The presentationBegin with the question.
If you are considering a consequential technology decision, begin with the question. We can establish whether my contribution would be useful before discussing sensitive detail.