Interim Group Chief Information Officer — Value Agenda

A technologist who has switched things off

Your career includes running technology for a business with revenue of $510 million or more, 1,600 people and operations in two countries, and your record includes systems you retired as well as systems you built. That matters here. Any technology leader can point to a launch; fewer can show the model they withdrew because its outputs could not be explained, or the platform they decommissioned because nobody could name what it was still for. When a technology case left adoption and downside unstated, you said no to the money and then rebuilt the capability to do the work properly, and you can show a chief executive exactly what is still unknown without hiding in it.

Your background in ESG transition, digital transformation and carve-out will be examined with care. Each teaches something this seat needs: an ESG transition teaches that data reported outside the business must be traceable to source; digital transformation teaches the gap between a pilot and an adopted tool; a carve-out teaches how tangled systems really are once someone tries to separate them. The Group Chief Executive Officer also wants risk judgement at level 4, and level 3 across data and AI governance, product delivery and architecture at scale.

Switching off as a decision right

This is an interim executive role with the authority to act, and you answer directly to the Group Chief Executive Officer. You will draw up who decides what in technology across the group, including the limits local leaders may decide within. You will decide what proof a technology investment, a capacity request or a control has to show before it is approved. You determine which inherited technology commitments go on, which are held and which stop; you can block a plan that shifts cost or exposure onto others without anyone signing for it, or decline value cases that are silent on use, reliance or failure. You approve the technology leadership structure and work through disagreements with the business's operating heads before budgets are released. You should not need unanimous agreement from country leaders to stop a technology commitment.

Override and retirement, on a 24-month clock

The disciplines at the centre of this brief are simple to state and hard to run. Every AI or automated decision system needs evidence that it works, a human who can override it, and a condition under which it is retired. By the time ninety days have passed, decision rights for AI and technology investment should be agreed, with evidence, override and retirement conditions written for every live system. By around month nine the inherited commitments should have been reviewed, and systems that lack adoption or an accountable owner should be scheduled for retirement. By month 24 AI and technology decisions should be governed by override and retirement controls that have been exercised, not merely written, with a route for raising concerns that the Group Chief Executive Officer endorses.

The chief executive first, the board last

The opening conversation, held privately over video during week one, is with the Group Chief Executive Officer; the subject is how you decide that a system should be switched off. Week three is a working session in which the Board Chair works through the issues with you. In the fifth week you sit opposite executive leaders from the business functions, who will want to know how your override rules affect the tools they rely on, and the seventh week ends with the full board. Within two working days of each stage, we will tell you in writing where you stand.