Advisory Director — Technology Value at Scale

Two years of investment that has to earn its place

Within the first ninety days, the Group Chief Executive Officer should have agreed, on the Advisory Director's counsel, the tests every technology investment must meet: evidence that people will use it, evidence that it will stay up and recover when it fails, and evidence that it creates value someone can measure. Simple to state, these tests are hard to apply, because most investment cases are written by the people who want the money.

Around month nine proposals should be reviewed against those tests as a matter of course, and the adviser's challenge recorded wherever adoption or resilience evidence is weak. The record matters: it lets leadership see, a year later, whether the challenge was right.

By month 24 the tests should have survived a full planning cycle, leadership should be applying them without help, and investments involving AI should be held to the same standard as everything else rather than waved through on enthusiasm.

Questions before approvals

The seat is advisory, and the person you counsel is the Group Chief Executive Officer. You will not approve spending; you will make sure the people who do are asking the right questions. You will help leadership agree how technology investment decisions are divided between the centre and local leaders, advise on what a technology funding request should prove before money, engineers or control exceptions are granted, and give a view on which inherited technology commitments still justify their cost. You will challenge any proposal whose risk lands with nobody, and any investment case that assumes usage, hides what it depends on, or does not say what failure would look like. You will also advise on how the technology leadership is organised, the path disputes take upward and how often the board should see progress, exceptions and choices not yet made.

The adviser we need

You have seen technology reach production before anyone had decided who could stop it, and you learned from it. Your experience was gathered in technology or digital platforms organisations turning over $705 million or more, employing 1,100 or more people and operating in seven or more countries. The board weighs scale-up, digital transformation and buy-side M&A, each a setting where technology spending outruns the evidence for it. Risk judgement at level 4 is the defining capability; data and AI governance, product delivery and architecture that scales are expected at level 3. You can tell a necessary local exception from one protected by history, and you accept that your most valuable early advice may be to stop something.

Meeting leadership

The first step, in week one, is an off-the-record conversation by video with the Group Chief Executive Officer. Week three is a working session with the Risk Committee Chair on how resilience evidence should be tested. Week five is a panel of executives, met in person, representing each of the cooperative's functions, and week seven holds a closing session with the whole board of directors. Expect our response in writing within 4 working days of each stage.