Clas Törnquist

About

Technology is never the goal. Technology is a tool for helping people and organizations work better. That sentence sounds obvious, but most failed IT investments can be traced back to someone forgetting it.

Good decisions start with a correct understanding of the problem. So I almost never start with the technology. I start with the system behind the problem: why the organization exists, what it is trying to achieve, how decisions actually get made, where information flows and where it stops.

That habit comes from having worked through every major technology shift in IT since the late 1980s: PCs and networks, the internet, virtualization, the cloud, identity — and now generative AI. Three decades of watching big promises arrive teaches you what separates the investments that work from the ones that quietly fail.

For the past four years I have worked as a systems manager in a Swedish municipality. That has given me an inside view of public sector reality: public procurement, systems management models, business development and information security — and a solid understanding of identity and federation, ITIL and ISO 27000. More recently I have focused on what the AI Act actually means for organizations that need to comply with it, not just talk about it.

I began exploring generative AI in 2020, before it became part of everyday software development. Since then I have built prototypes, developed and launched commercial products, evaluated AI-assisted development workflows and published original work on software semantics and governance. I do not study new technology from a distance — I learn by building.

How I work

Many consultants cover similar competence areas. What separates them is how they approach problems. What follows is not a consulting process with five colorful boxes — it is how I actually think, in roughly the order it happens.

  1. 1.Understand the business

    I do not start with the technology. I start with why the organization exists and what problem it is trying to solve.

  2. 2.Map the current state

    Which systems are in place? How does information flow between them? Which decisions are made, by whom, and on what basis? Which dependencies would hurt if they broke?

  3. 3.Identify the root problem

    Many organizations work hard at treating symptoms. I look for the cause. It is often somewhere other than where the pain is felt.

  4. 4.Choose the right path

    Sometimes the answer is AI. Sometimes it is better processes. Sometimes it is no new technology at all. The honest answer is worth more than the exciting one.

  5. 5.Execute

    Once the direction is clear, the technology becomes much simpler. Most projects that struggle do so because this order was reversed.

Frameworks are tools, not religion

I do not work from a single framework. I use what fits the situation: ITIL, TOGAF, ISO 27000, the AI Act, NIS2, identity, risk analysis, architecture, process mapping. That means I am not selling you a framework. I am selling judgment.

I write a lot. I reason in text. If you want to know how I think, the articles on this site are a better introduction than any sales page. Read a few of them and you will know whether we would work well together.

This work is done under the Cetriq name, which is also where I build products — including C2CS and tools for requirements analysis and AI governance.