Advisory Director — Technology Value (Logistics and Infrastructure)

Counsel for a committee steering a platform change

Changing a product and platform model is one of the few technology decisions that touches every customer and every operating team at once, and it rarely fails because the target architecture was wrong. It fails because delivery slips while two models run side by side, because nobody owns the awkward middle period, or because reliability is quietly traded for speed. The Advisory Director is appointed to sit with the Technology Committee Chair and the committee for 24 months and help them steer through exactly that middle period. The authority is that of counsel: the committee and management decide, and the adviser makes sure they decide with the right evidence in front of them.

That counsel has a definite shape. The adviser helps the committee agree which technology decisions remain with local leaders and which it reserves, and shapes the evidence it uses to oversee technology spending, engineering capacity and controls. They advise on which inherited technology commitments should go forward and which should be held or retired, which in a platform change usually means confronting legacy work that still has loyal sponsors. They question proposals that load cost or risk onto others with nobody answerable, and value cases that say nothing of adoption, of the systems they rely on or of the cost of failure. They give their view on how the technology leadership is organised and how problems travel upward, and help the committee and operating leaders work through conflicts.

You have made technology choices in logistics and infrastructure where waiting was expensive, in businesses turning over at least $360 million with 2,000 or more people, across six countries or more. Digital transformation is the obvious requirement. Culture reset and integration are less obvious and just as important, because a new platform model asks engineers and operators to work differently together. The capabilities we will test are risk judgement at level 4, and architecture at scale, product delivery, and data and AI governance, all three at level 3. You do not let an exception run on until you know whose budget pays for it, and you will tell a committee chair what remains unknown while still putting a recommendation on the table. You protect the controls worth keeping and leave a stronger bench behind you.

What the committee should see over the term

Within ninety days the committee should have agreed how product and platform delivery will be governed through the change of model, including what it looks at each meeting and what would make it intervene. Around month nine, it should be reviewing real platform delivery evidence and should have assessed each inherited technology commitment, keeping, holding or retiring it. By month 24, the new product and platform model should be overseen through agreed delivery measures, clear ownership and a working escalation route, with reliability maintained throughout.

Getting the measure of one another

What we most want to learn is how your counsel changes a committee's decisions, not how much of it there is. The process opens privately, by video, with the Technology Committee Chair in the first week, on how you would advise through a change of model. In week three, the Regional President spends a session with you testing whether your advice holds up in operating reality. Week five brings an in-person meeting with executives, one for each major function, and in the seventh week you meet the full board. Five working days is the most you should wait for our written view after any stage.