A retrospective
Chief Information Officer · 2006 — present
Room I
Enterprise technology must support change while keeping essential work dependable. I begin with business capabilities, make dependencies visible and agree ownership of the transition with operating leaders. Resilience and adoption belong in the investment case from the start.
Bo Xu
Room II
The disciplines to which this career has returned, again and again.
Room III
Each work is a decision: its context, the choice made and what followed.
Work 01
Medium: judgement, people and capital
A fragmented application estate was making business change harder to coordinate. I established an enterprise roadmap grounded in business capabilities, mapped critical dependencies and agreed a staged transition with the operating teams. The work gave sponsors a clear view of what each phase enabled and prevented local projects from creating new enterprise constraints.
Work 02
Medium: judgement, people and capital
Resilience had been discussed as a technical topic detached from business continuity. We mapped critical services to their technology dependencies, clarified recovery responsibilities and rehearsed decision-making across teams. The programme made ownership visible and turned resilience into an operating conversation involving the people who would make decisions during disruption.
Work 03
Medium: judgement, people and capital
Different business units used the same terms for different measures. I convened business owners and technology leaders to establish shared definitions, ownership and practical controls around important data. We began with specific decisions that needed better information, allowing the value of governance to be demonstrated through everyday use.
Room IV
62%
Applications retired
Simplified estate in three years
99.98%
Core platform availability
Through a full modernisation
₹740 Cr
Run-cost released
Reinvested in digital products
14
Countries on one ERP
From nine legacy systems
Room V
A career, hung in chronological order.
2006 — 2011
Westmoor Housing Finance
2011 — 2016
Meridian Consolidated
2016 — 2020
Fairhaven Holdings
2020 — Present
Aldermoor Group
Room VI
Boards and institutions that have entrusted their stewardship.
Independent Director · IT Strategy (Chair) · Risk
2022 — Present
Advisory Board Member · Cyber Resilience Working Group
2020 — Present
Room VII
Made technology a boardroom conversation about outcomes, not acronyms.
Modernised the core while the business kept running at full speed. A rare combination of courage and care.
Room VIII
Essays written alongside the work.
An application replacement is easier to describe than the business change it is meant to enable.
Read the essayA recovery plan is incomplete if the people who must make decisions have never worked through it together.
Read the essayA system can be available without becoming the organisation's way of working.
Read the essayRoom IX
Honours
Reviews
The Technology Leaders Review · 2025
“Retiring 600 applications without breaking the business”
The Boardroom Review · 2024
“What boards should ask about cyber resilience”
The Leadership Ledger podcast · 2023
“Episode 98 — Technology debt is a strategy decision”
An invitation
For board, advisory and speaking enquiries — a conversation is the best way to see the work.
office@boxu.example