Interim Chief Technology Officer — Renewal

From where engineers are to where they matter

Most engineering organisations can tell you what their people are working on. Far fewer can tell you what that work is worth. The first ninety days of this appointment should close that gap: engineering capacity mapped against product priorities, a clear split between what the CTO decides and what stays with local technology leads, and an accountable lead agreed with the committee for each priority. Around month nine, low-value work should be stopped or on hold, the engineers it occupied should be on higher-value priorities, and the main architecture risks should have been reviewed so that the shift does not leave something fragile unattended. By month 18, the organisation should be running an allocation cycle that ties engineering capacity to value as a habit, in a form others can carry on once the interim term closes.

The authority to move engineers

The Interim Chief Technology Officer answers to the Technology Committee Chair and holds executive authority. That means deciding which choices local leadership keeps, choosing the evidence that governs technology spend, engineering capacity and controls, and deciding where engineering commitments go on and where they stop. It means stopping any plan that passes cost or risk along with no one answerable for it, declining investment whose case is silent on adoption, on dependencies or on the downside, approving who leads engineering and the route a problem takes upward, brokering settlements when the committee and operating leaders disagree, and deciding how often the board sees delivery progress, overruns and unresolved choices.

The hardest part is usually legacy demand: requests from long-standing users that are reasonable one at a time and ruinous in aggregate. Deciding where engineering stops serving them is the central judgement of the seat, and it has to be made in the open, with the people who will lose something told why.

A technologist who has said no to legacy demand

The technology organisations you have run sat inside businesses of $740 million revenue or more, 3,900 people or more and two or more countries. You know logistics and infrastructure from calls that were yours to make, among them a commitment you halted because its case did not hold up, before it could do harm. Digital transformation and turnaround sit at the centre of this mandate. ESG transition matters as well, because sustainability reporting increasingly depends on engineering work that competes for the same capacity. Expect us to probe risk judgement at level 4, then three further capabilities at level 3: data and AI governance, architecture at scale, and product delivery. Committee chairs and the operators nearest the work have both attacked your baselines, and the baselines held. You can say which engineering decisions belong with local leads and which should come to the centre, and you write that division down.

A compact process

The Technology Committee Chair meets you first, one to one by video, in week one. The second week brings a case to work through with the Audit Committee Chair, who will ask how a reallocation of engineering effort would be evidenced and controlled. In the third week you meet the directors in person. Each stage gets a written reply from us within three working days.