I learned to ask what the customer would actually recognise as a different need.

I began work in August 1991 as a business research analyst at the fictional Lianveth Advisory, after completing management studies at Yuevian Institute of Management. I belonged to an eight-person project team and had no independent expense authority. Much of the early work involved describing what a customer organisation was trying to accomplish before comparing the available propositions. I became interested in the distance between a supplier's category for its offer and the actual work the customer expected it to support.

The distinction was easy to miss when two requests used similar language. An apparent common requirement could sit inside different operating responsibilities, while differently named requests could concern much the same underlying problem. I learned to ask which difference mattered to the customer and which existed mainly in the supplier's catalogue. That question later became central to my work in enterprise services, where the reuse of a component does not by itself establish that the whole service can be sold, introduced and supported in the same way.

I became an engagement lead in March 1998. By 2004 I worked with eighteen colleagues through three direct reports and held CNY 3.8 million in annual delivery-expense delegation. The budget funded our advisory work, rather than a client's technology investment. I had to make research useful to people deciding what kind of business they wanted to build. A description of a market was insufficient unless the recommendation also explained the responsibility the provider would undertake in serving it.

In July 2005 I joined Xunveris Systems as head of service planning. The move put me inside an enterprise application-services business whose catalogue had developed through customer projects. I wanted to understand which elements could become a repeatable proposition and which needed to remain tailored. My function worked with commercial, delivery and technical colleagues, without claiming authority over their specialist decisions. The central question was about the business being offered, not simply whether a technical asset could be used again.

I made an avoidable mistake in 2009. After a bespoke programme, I supported retaining fourteen local variants in the catalogue because I assumed that more choice would improve the next sale. A later review found six genuinely different customer needs and eight variants without a distinct buyer requirement. Revising the catalogue and research cost CNY 1.9 million. I had allowed the history of what we had built to stand in for evidence of what another customer would value. The correction did not make all customisation undesirable; it required a reason for preserving each difference.

From April 2012 I led the service portfolio. A 2016 review challenged the way we described recurring economics. A cohort with CNY 48 million in contracted annual service fees also required CNY 17 million in separately budgeted initial transition and project work. Those quantities could not be collapsed into a simple margin comparison, but both mattered to the proposition. I supported CNY 2.1 million in assessment and commercial redesign, keeping the work before service commencement visible alongside the recurring fee.

I became CSO in June 2019. My current remit covers seventy-two strategy and proposition colleagues in a company employing 6800 people. Subsequent decisions have examined the rights behind a channel proposition, the customer workflows behind a reusable service and the choice between building a specialist layer internally or working through a partner. Each involves a different limit on what the commercial description can responsibly claim. None is settled merely by finding an attractive technical component or a larger estimate of potential demand.

In the 2023 service review, twelve customer programmes shared a software core, but four required a materially different operating workflow. We retained eight within the standard proposition and treated four as bespoke. The decision mattered because standardisation described a customer undertaking, not just a code base. The technical, contractual and support assessments remained with their owners. My contribution was to ensure that the business account did not treat a common component as proof of one common market.

I have presented to the board as an executive since June 2019 and have no statutory appointment. A future board contribution would require preparation beyond the executive service-strategy record. I would want it assessed through the questions I can help a board examine and the areas where I would need further learning. This entire career is fictional. Its purpose is to show how an IT-services strategist can explain commercial choices with enough detail to distinguish the provider's offer, the customer's problem and the authority needed to make the undertaking real.