Interim Chief Digital and Data Officer — Value Agenda (Business Services)

Not an evangelist, and not a caretaker

Plenty of interim technology leaders are hired to accelerate. The Interim Chief Digital and Data Officer is being hired to govern. The appointee will not be judged on how many AI use cases go live in the next 12 months, nor on the elegance of a target architecture. Nor is the seat a holding role that keeps systems running and changes nothing. It carries executive authority, exercised under the Regional President, over how decisions that models and data shape are evidenced, how they are overruled when they go wrong, and how they are switched off when they stop earning their place.

Three controls every model must carry

Procedural as they sound, these three words are where AI governance either holds or quietly erodes. Evidence means deciding, before a model is allowed to shape a fee estimate or a resourcing choice, what proof of performance it must carry and who signs for that proof. Override means that anyone relying on a model's output can set it aside, that the override is recorded, and that override patterns are read as information, not friction. Retirement is the hardest of the three. Models and data products accumulate, and few organisations have the discipline to decommission one when its value has decayed or the person who championed it has moved on.

Around those controls the appointee holds real authority. They will set which digital and data calls sit with local leaders and at what threshold a decision comes to the centre. They will define what evidence governs spending, engineering effort and control. They will block any model or data proposal that shifts its running cost or failure risk onto a team that never signed for it, and turn down investment that has not reckoned with whether staff will use the tool, which systems it leans on and what breaks when it fails. They will also shape the leadership team beneath them, settle disputes between the Regional President and operating leaders, and fix the rhythm on which the board hears about progress and open questions.

A governor with a professionaliser's record

The technology functions you have led should have sat inside businesses of $425 million or more in revenue, employing 1,700 people and operating in two countries. Your experience of professionalisation, digital transformation and succession will count for more than any single platform you have built. Professionalisation above all: you have taken a function that ran on goodwill and individual heroics and given it standards, accountable people and a cadence that outlasted you. Your risk judgement should sit at level 4, because the job turns on deciding which model failures are tolerable and which are not. Level 3 is the bar for product delivery, for architecture at scale and for governing data and AI: enough to argue with engineers on their own ground and spot a delivery plan that will not survive reality. You can tell the Regional President what remains unresolved without treating uncertainty as grounds to wait, and you will stop a technology commitment without first collecting every country leader's blessing.

The year ahead, and how we will meet

By day ninety, you and the Regional President should have settled where AI and data decisions sit, which thresholds belong to local leaders, and the override and retirement controls every live model must answer to. Around month nine, each AI and data commitment in flight should have been examined against its evidence; any that nobody is prepared to own will have been paused or retired, with the reasoning written down. At month 12 the board should be receiving regular reporting on AI decisions, the overrides that occurred and the exceptions still open, and the successors you have developed should be running that reporting without you.

The Regional President opens the process in week 1, by confidential video, asking how you would bring AI decisions under evidence. In week 3 the Audit Committee Chair will take your override and retirement controls apart to see whether they would stand up to audit. In week 5 you sit down in person with an executive panel drawn from every major function, and in week 7 the board's directors close the process. Our written assessment follows each stage within three working days.