My Work as a Consultant

I began as a self-employed consultant in October, 2023. At that point, I added a consulting tab in my eportfolio site to explain what kind of work I do.

I told my story where for 10 years, I wrote for Canadian small-to-medium-sized businesses. I helped them understand and comply with federal and provincial employment laws.

From that point on, I have continued to write instructive online articles in employment law and also my PhD areas (my PhD was about surveillance technology and privacy in the workplace) to help Canadian organizations understand and comply with privacy/cybersecurity, data governance/stewardship, and artificial intelligence laws.

My experiences have provided me with the knowledge and skills to help organizations with the challenges they face. I love thinking about the implications of technology and their impact on my specialty areas. We can all agree that emerging technologies are currently introducing new issues and concerns, and we need to be agile...

In addition, when discussing my vision, I stated that my life’s purpose is to use my creativity and knowledge/skills/abilities to make the world a better place for humanity. In like manner, the long-term vision for my consulting work is to use my knowledge/skills/abilities to help humanity by asking thoughtful questions that help people cautiously consider the implications of technology.

In line with my vision above and professional values below, the shorter-term mission for my consulting work is to offer consulting services to Canadian organizations in the following areas (with a few examples below):

Privacy/Cybersecurity

• Developing privacy programs, including drafting and implementing privacy policies and procedures; likewise, creating a cybersecurity program, including explaining what is required to minimize security risks and improve an organization's cybersecurity posture
• Conducting Privacy Impact Assessments, and pointing out any privacy risks that are associated with the organization’s data flow
• Providing training materials concerning an organization’s safeguarding procedures
• Tracking legislative reform and policy initiatives and creating submissions on behalf of organizations that wish to make an impact in legislative policy

Data Governance and Stewardship

• Creating a data strategy that includes topics such as data classification, data retention schedules, and data disposal procedures
• Understanding the location of the organization’s data and how it flows through the organization (dataflow mapping) to ensure data integrity
• Providing data ethics strategies and frameworks, and providing data ethics training materials for key employees in the organization
• Providing a framework for ethical decision-making to enable more responsible decisions and prevent unintended consequences involving the organization’s data

Artificial Intelligence

• Dealing with AI Governance for organizations
• Creating AI ethics strategies and frameworks
• Conducting AI Impact Assessments and mitigating AI-related risks that surface across each stage of the AI lifecycle
• Generating strategies to obtain the necessary buy-in from key stakeholders regarding AI ethics strategies and frameworks for desired AI initiatives to maximize the responsible use of data across all stages of the AI lifecycle

Employment/HR

• Creating policies and procedures that can form part of an organization’s employee handbook
• Assisting with HR Strategy regarding the future of work
• Tackling issues such as privacy in the workplace by creating employee training materials to explain technological, organizational, and physical safeguards that protect the organization from unauthorized access and disclosure
• Addressing issues such as human rights in the workplace by creating Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion training materials for employees in the organization

Editorial, Thought Leadership, and Technology Policy Work in the above areas:

• Researching particular use cases necessary to understand technology laws or policies
• Reviewing news events and discussing how they affect current laws and policies
• Collaborating in multi-disciplinary, cross-functional distributed agile teams to create policy deliverables
• Creating whitepapers, online articles, and communications for organizations
• Ghostwriting