A different kind of consultant

I'm Dave Talbot. Before I ever built a database, I was a police officer, and policing teaches you something that has shaped every system I've built since: technology only matters if it helps the people using it.

I saw first-hand what happens when systems are designed around the technology instead of the job. Officers wrestling with screens instead of serving the public. Paperwork that existed to feed the system rather than the other way round. When I moved into IT, I promised myself I'd never build anything like that.

That was 1986. I've been keeping that promise ever since.

What forty years teaches you

Nearly four decades of practice (and, along the way, a computer science degree, a training qualification and 35 years as a public speaker) teaches you things no manual can:

That the person who knows most about what a system needs to do is usually the person typing into it every day, not the person who commissioned it.

That most "IT problems" are really working-practice problems wearing a disguise.

That plain English is not dumbing down: it's the hardest and most valuable skill in this industry.

And that new technology, from the databases of the eighties to the AI tools of today, rewards the organisations that adopt it carefully and punishes the ones that adopt it carelessly. I've been working hands-on with AI since 2023, and helping organisations use it safely is now a major part of what I do.

Who I work with

My clients over the years have spanned SMEs, charities, membership bodies and public sector organisations. I'm trusted with some of the most sensitive data there is, and I bring the same care to a ten-person charity's membership records as to anything else I've handled.

But the common thread isn't the sector. It's that every one of them had a job to do, a system getting in the way, and a preference for straight answers over sales pitches.

Beyond the day job

I'm an Associate Member of the Professional Speaking Association, and I give talks on two subjects that sound unrelated but aren't: the history of policing, and the safe organisational use of AI. Both are really about the same thing: how people and institutions adapt to change.

I also sit as a lay member on a number of NIHR (National Institute for Health and Care Research) funding committees, where my job is to bring a plain-English, real-world perspective to decisions about health research. And I mentor newly appointed lay members finding their feet in that world.

That role has a personal root. I'm a breast cancer survivor, diagnosed in 2015 (yes, men get it too), and I work actively with breast cancer charities to raise awareness of the disease in men. If reading that sentence made you check something you'd been putting off, it's already done its job.

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