Alan is a senior chartered IT professional with broad expertise.

In his current role he is Managing Director of Hartley Consultants Limited engaging in a variety of customer assignments as well as running the business. These have included a Smart Grid consultancy exercise, Web Site implementation, Database application management and configuring, hosting and supporting Open Source software packages. He is also the IT director of “Melinda's Backups”, an official fan club supporting Melinda Doolittle from American Idol.

His role for the previous 15 years has been as a global business developer with Logica, understanding, initially, the detail of electricity liberalisation; and metering and settlement in particular and latterly the implications of the introduction of smart metering and how this will interact with smart grids. Using that knowledge he has helped local Logica units around the world set up Energy and Utility (E&U) practices and has supported them in winning and undertaking key projects. This brings both the people skills to bring together diverse international teams, but also involved public speaking at large conferences and smaller teaching seminars at Logica international gatherings, and getting involved as the business analyst and data modelling expert in implementation projects.

Prior to that Alan also held senior roles as a Chief Engineer, responsible for product strategy, IT infrastructure and software engineering techniques (including teaching software project management at Logica courses); and as a Line Manager responsible for financial and business performance of a unit of 70 software development staff.

In his early career, Alan progressed from Programmer (with a range of languages from Assember through to C) through to Technical Architect, with a strong emphasis on Real Time and Embedded systems.

As Alan's career moved away from the technical side, he continued that passion as his hobby, developing skills in Linux, in Java, PHP and Javascript software development using multiple database management systems coupled with HTML and CSS based Web development. He retains those skills today.