I learnt to follow a confident report back to the question it had not answered

The first reports I helped maintain at Natsumori Utilities had a reassuring regularity. They appeared on schedule, used familiar labels and gave managers a consistent format. I was a new information-systems graduate, and producing that dependable output seemed an obvious definition of doing the job well. Conversations with the people using it complicated the picture. A value could arrive on time while referring to an earlier condition. A record could be complete in one application but ambiguous when read beside another. I began to ask what a user needed to know before acting on the screen.

I joined Natsumori in April 1995 after completing my degree at Sorikawa Institute the previous month. I worked in a nine-person applications team, with no direct reports or budget authority. The experience taught me to follow a question back to the person who understood its operating context. I could change a report, but I could not settle every disagreement by changing the software. By the end of that appointment, the company employed 1,900 people and reported JPY74 billion revenue. Those were enterprise figures, not a responsibility I personally held.

Kumelori recruited me in April 2003 to manage systems supporting a smaller generating business. I led twenty-six colleagues through three reports, with annual authority reaching JPY420 million in the final period. I wanted to own the continuing usefulness of the applications as well as their introduction. The move made the relationship with maintenance and operations more immediate. A system question could concern an equipment identity, a work record or the timing of an observation. I learnt to make the operating owner part of the explanation instead of treating their uncertainty as an inconvenient data-cleaning task.

In January 2010 I became head of asset information. The role brought forty-nine employees and JPY1.3 billion annual authority by its closing period. Kumelori expanded to twelve sites, and the common record became more valuable and more difficult to interpret. Local teams often had good reasons for their existing language. My task was to preserve the distinctions that mattered while making the portfolio account usable. I became less interested in declaring a single perfect source than in showing where a statement came from, when it applied and who could explain an exception. That changed how I discussed technology with senior colleagues.

The enterprise-platform appointment followed in July 2015. I led seventy-eight employees through five reports and reached JPY3.2 billion authority by the end of 2020. Infrastructure investors entered the business in 2017, holding 70% beside the founders' 30%. The wider organisation needed an account of the fleet that could support management and investment discussions without losing the conditions known at each site. I worked on the relationships between asset information, maintenance material and reporting. I did not become the owner of plant controls or engineering safety. Those distinctions became more important as the corporate view became more persuasive.

Since January 2021 I have served as CIO. Today's remit covers 108 employees through five direct reports, with thirty-six contractors separately. Our FY2026–27 authority is JPY5.8 billion. Kumelori operates twenty-eight Japanese solar and wind sites, with 2.4GW of aggregate nameplate capacity and 4.8TWh generation during 2025. The business employs 2,400 people including maintenance and service operations, and recorded JPY92 billion revenue for the year ended March 2026. I keep those periods and measures distinct when describing the enterprise. A capacity figure cannot simply be read as continuous output, just as a reporting improvement cannot be described as additional generation.

Recent work has sharpened the same concern in different ways. We retained twelve unavailable observations after a dashboard repair rather than quietly displaying older values. We held thirty-two maintenance links for engineering examination instead of assuming that similar asset names referred to the same equipment. A reconciliation replay required us to correct interval interpretation without claiming that physical readings had changed. In a continuity rehearsal, the two sites taking longer than the agreed window mattered as much as the seven that met it. I see these as decisions about the honesty and usefulness of the enterprise account, with practical costs and owners attached.

I present technology decisions to Kumelori's directors but have no board appointment. A future external contribution would require broader preparation and an examination of relationships, time and the proposed mandate. I could offer experience in questioning the assumptions inside a confident operating view, while recognising that collective oversight extends beyond my executive speciality. My interest is in helping people understand what they can responsibly conclude from the record before them. That has remained the thread from my first application reports to the decisions I now bring to the chief executive and board.