Interim Chief Digital and Data Officer — Architecture and Value

Not a rebuild, and not a freeze

Two tempting answers to architectural dependency are both wrong here. One is the grand rebuild that halts delivery for a year while a cleaner platform is designed. The other is to keep shipping and promise to address the architecture later. The interim appointment, made under the Group Chief Executive Officer, takes the third path: choose an architecture that reduces dependency step by step, while the teams keep delivering.

The work of reducing dependency in flight

Dependency takes many forms in a digital and data estate: a single vendor nobody can replace quickly, a shared database that every service touches, a data domain with no clear owner, a piece of code only two people understand. Reducing it while delivery continues means sequencing the work so that each step leaves the platform more independent and still working, and resisting proposals that add new dependencies faster than old ones are removed.

Executive authority comes with the seat. You will set the thresholds for digital and data decisions that remain local, and choose the test a data or platform investment must pass in both countries. Inherited commitments, including vendor contracts and in-flight builds, stand or fall on your ruling. You can stop a proposal that adds a dependency nobody has agreed to own, and decline investment that cannot show it will be used, what it will lean on, or how a failure would play out. The leadership structure is yours to approve, so is the way problems rise, and any conflict with operating leaders is yours to resolve before money is spent.

A leader who untangles live platforms

You have led a cost transformation whose effects were felt by directors and delivery teams alike, in technology or digital platforms businesses with revenue of $610 million or more, at least 1,200 people and operations in two countries or more. The board also weighs digital transformation and turnaround. Risk judgement at level 4 is the leading capability; data and AI governance, product delivery and architecture designed to scale are each wanted at level 3. You have put a disputed downside to a chief executive without softening it. You keep the controls that work, put a price on every exception, and leave behind leaders able to carry on without you. If you prefer clean-sheet redesigns to the slower work of untangling a live platform, the seat will frustrate you.

Dependencies reduced, delivery kept

Over the first ninety days, the Group Chief Executive Officer should sign off the target architecture and the dependencies to tackle first, without current delivery pausing. By month nine the priority dependencies should be reduced in line with the plan, delivery maintained throughout, and data ownership assigned for each domain. By month 18 architecture choices should sit inside delivery governance, with the remaining dependencies owned and reviewed by the board at a set rhythm.

Selection is quick. It begins in week one with an off-the-record conversation by video with the Group Chief Executive Officer. In week two the Board Chair gives you a case: choose which dependency to tackle first, and say why. In week three the board directors meet you in person. Each stage gets our written reply within 2 working days.