Interim Chief Digital and Data Officer — Controls

The trade-offs that cyber resilience forces

Every serious resilience decision costs something visible. Hardening access slows the people who serve customers. Segmenting systems delays integrations that operations have been promised. Taking a vulnerable service offline protects data and disappoints the people who depend on it. This interim seat comes with executive authority to make those calls in the open, so that resilience, operations and customers are weighed together instead of each winning by default in turn.

The calls run wider than security. You will set one allocation of decisions across digital, data and cyber matters, spelling out what local leaders may still approve themselves, and choose the evidence that funding, capacity and control decisions must rest on. Every commitment then gets your ruling to proceed, wait or close, and an initiative that dumps cost or risk on a team that never signed up for it goes no further. Investment cases that take adoption for granted, overlook what they depend on or leave the downside unpriced will be declined. You will settle the leadership structure and its escalation route, broker disputes with operating leaders, and fix how frequently the board looks at progress, exceptions and the calls still pending. For an organisation serving the public on a not-for-profit basis the judgement is especially fine, because resilience spending competes directly with service, and the board needs to see that trade-off made deliberately.

Two years of resilience that sits alongside the customer

After the first ninety days there should be one agreed allocation of decisions for digital, data and cyber, with resilience thresholds set alongside operating and customer priorities rather than against them. By month nine, cyber and data commitments should have been sorted into those that continue, those paused and those ended, each with an accountable person and a downside case. Month 24 should find digital, data and cyber leadership embedded, resilience tested in practice, and the board receiving resilience reports next to the customer priorities they protect.

An executive who has ended something popular

During a platform pivot you have redrawn who decides, how money flows and how teams pace their work, in organisations of at least $660 million in revenue and 3,200 people across six or more countries. You can point to a well-liked commitment you brought to an end, show the data that justified ending it, and name what that freed up. You have told a committee chair about a contested downside in plain terms, without softening the consequence. Platform pivot, digital transformation and crisis response experience are examined, the last because resilience is ultimately tested on a bad day. Risk judgement is expected at level 4; at level 3 we look for architecture that scales, product delivery, and the governance of data and AI. Unknowns do not stop you recommending a course, a single reluctant country head will not delay a stop decision, and the outcome stays yours for the full two years.

Starting with the Technology Committee Chair

The Technology Committee Chair is your first conversation, held privately by video during week one. In the third week the Regional President may ask you to weigh a resilience measure against a service commitment. The fifth week is a meeting in person with executive leaders from each function of the business, and the process closes with the full board of directors in the seventh week. A written reply on every stage reaches you within five working days.