Interim Chief Information Officer — Value Agenda

Reliability and reinvention in the same year

Ask most technology leaders whether they would rather stabilise services or change the operating model, and they will say one, then the other. This interim Chief Information Officer is being asked to do both at once, and the reason is practical. A move to product and platform teams changes who owns each service, and if ownership blurs during the change, reliability is the first thing to suffer. Done well, the two reinforce each other: teams that own a service end to end tend to run it better, and a reliability baseline gives those teams something concrete to own.

In insurance the services in question are far from abstract. Policy issuance, claims payments, broker and customer portals and regulatory reporting each have users or supervisors who notice failure within hours. A CIO therefore needs a clear view of which services are critical, who answers for each and how they are performing before reorganising anything around them.

The authority attached to the seat is executive. With the Group Chief Executive Officer as your reporting line, you will agree how technology decisions are taken and what local IT leads may settle without reference to the group. You will decide which data a technology request must bring before money, delivery capacity or control changes are approved. Inherited platform commitments proceed or stop on your decision. You will block proposals that load cost or risk onto a team that never accepted it, and decline investment whose case omits its users, what else it leans on and what failure would cost. You will approve the technology leadership structure and how issues rise, and find a settlement when the Group Chief Executive Officer and business heads disagree.

The person who does this well has carried regulatory remediation whose effects were felt by directors and by staff serving customers alike, in organisations with revenue of $955 million or more, 1,400 or more people and a presence in five countries or more. Experience of regulatory remediation, digital transformation and professionalisation will each be weighed. Risk judgement is expected at level 4; at level 3 the seat asks for sound data and AI governance, delivery of products and architecture that scales. Before allowing an exception to continue, you have identified who bears its cost. You also accept that your first visible result could be a platform commitment halted rather than one begun, and you can back that with evidence.

Baseline, migration, one cadence by month 12

Within 90 days a reliability baseline and a first set of platform decisions should be agreed, with an accountable owner for each critical service. Around month nine the move to a product and platform model should be well under way, and inherited platform commitments should have been confirmed, paused or brought to an end. By month 12, reliability and the new model should be governed through a single cadence that whoever leads technology next can pick up on the first day.

Holding both threads in front of the board

If you would need unanimous consent from country leaders before stopping a technology commitment, or want influence over the platform without answering for the outcome across all 12 months, this is the wrong seat. For those it suits, the opening is a confidential video meeting with the Group Chief Executive Officer in the first week. The Risk Committee Chair takes the third week, working through a real reliability question with you. In week five, executives from every function meet you face to face, and in week seven the board as a whole makes the final assessment. A response in writing follows every stage within four working days.