Agron FazliuTechnology adviser
Writing

Thinking.

I write when a problem turns out to be useful beyond the project that produced it.

The gutter of an open book, pages curving away
Written down at the time, which is the only way to find out whether it held.
Start here

Three that need no background at all.

Why AI is a question of governance before it is a question of technology

What an organisation can actually integrate, control and be answerable for, versus what it has been told the technology can do.

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Why two things moving together does not mean one caused the other

The mistake that quietly sends product investment in the wrong direction, explained with ice cream and murder rates.

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How to use data about people without it becoming surveillance

Where the line sits between understanding how an organisation works and watching the individuals inside it, and why that is a design problem rather than a legal one.

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Questions I am working on now

Unfinished thinking, stated honestly.

These are the things I do not yet have a settled answer to. They are what the next few years of the work probably look like.

  • What changes when a system can act rather than only answer? Most of the rules we have were written for software that recommends, not software that does.
  • Which sensitive work genuinely needs models running on your own hardware, and which organisations are simply reassuring themselves at considerable expense?
  • When is buying another platform worse than simplifying the ones you already have? The second option is almost never on the agenda, because nobody sells it.
  • How should a board judge an AI proposal when what the technology can do changes every few months and the business case does not?
  • Which parts of technology leadership have to be permanent, and which are better brought in for a defined stretch and then let go?

If you have a view on any of these, I would rather hear it than not.

A dim landscape at dusk, a few birds crossing a pale strip of sky
The useful questions are the ones that do not have an answer yet.

AI, machine learning and research

The pieces closest to the work I do now.

Data and privacy

How to Make GDPR and ONA Work Together

Using data about how people work together without it becoming a way to watch them, and why that is a design problem rather than a legal one.

Medium
Data science

The Data Scientist With No Data

Where the discipline came from, what the job actually involves once the novelty wears off, and what it becomes next.

Medium
Operations research

IT Operations: A Queue Approach

How to work out when a support team is about to fall behind, instead of sizing it by last year's headcount plus a percentage.

Academia.edu

Technology and leadership

How organisations actually change, and why most of them do not.

A page of printed text seen close, the words falling out of focus
Written for one specific problem, and useful well past it.

These all came out of a problem somebody was actually stuck on.

If you are stuck on something similar, a short description of the situation is enough to start.

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