Chief Data Officer — Industrial-Equipment Business

The mandate

An industrial-equipment business is consolidating engineering, service and commercial activity from several legacy locations. Decades of drawings, serial configurations, service histories, customer contracts and test evidence sit across controlled systems, file shares, paper archives and experts’ local records. Property closure dates are fixed, but data migration has been treated as a technology task. A planned new Chief Data Officer will protect the information needed to build, repair and support equipment long after those sites close.

Approximately 2,750 employees and material partners depend on the data perimeter across product engineering, manufacturing, service, sales, quality, legal and finance. The CDO owns enterprise data governance, critical-record migration, master data, lineage, analytics and data-product teams. Functions remain accountable for meaning and retention; the CDO creates the controls and evidence that make their stewardship real.

Not all information deserves equal treatment. The leader will classify records by safety, legal, customer, intellectual-property, operational and historical value. A superseded drawing may still be essential for an installed serial, while a duplicate working file may create dangerous ambiguity. Disposal requires authorised retention rules and verified legal holds, not storage cost pressure.

Configuration is the hardest problem. Serial numbers, options, field modifications, software and service actions must link to the correct approved technical baseline. The CDO will prioritise data relationships that support safe repair and parts selection. Probabilistic matching can aid investigation but cannot silently create an authoritative configuration.

Migration must preserve context. File content without approval status, effective date, source and access restriction may be unusable. Scanning paper does not prove completeness or legibility. Sending-site experts will sample and sign off records at the receiving environment, and exceptions will remain visible until resolved. Site closure cannot be the mechanism for accepting data loss.

Customer and employee data require controlled access and lawful retention across jurisdictions. Technical archives may contain supplier intellectual property or export-controlled design. The CDO will design purpose-based permissions, monitoring, secure transfer and deletion evidence, including for temporary contractors and migration vendors.

Analytics and generative tools will be constrained by the same authority model. A search assistant may locate related service cases, but it cannot promote an unapproved draft or infer a missing tolerance as fact. The CDO will evaluate retrieval accuracy, citation, access leakage and human review before releasing tools against consolidated archives, and will retain an auditable route to the governing source.

The appointment is new because no existing data leader has cross-functional authority or direct access to consolidation governance. The CDO will build a small central team and distributed steward network rather than absorb every data task. The onsite Manchester base allows close work with principal archives and engineering leaders.

What you will own

• Classify critical technical, product, asset, customer and business records by obligation.
• Establish accountable stewardship, definitions, lineage, retention and access.
• Preserve serial configuration and installed-base history through consolidation.
• Govern migration completeness, context, sampling, exception and source retirement.
• Protect intellectual property, personal information and restricted technical data.
• Create data products for service, quality and commercial decisions after core control is stable.
• Ensure property and system closure gates include verified information readiness.
• Build data leaders and stewards across functions and receiving locations.

The first 12 months

Within 60 days, identify record collections whose loss could impair safety, customer support or legal defence and map their owners and condition. Stop source disposal where retention or migration evidence is incomplete. Select representative serials and trace the information required for a safe field decision.

By month six, deploy critical-data standards, migrate and validate priority engineering and service records and establish exception dashboards. Implement purpose-based access and vendor controls and complete disposition rules for redundant material. Embed data readiness into every site and system closure gate.

At twelve months, migrate 99.5% of identified critical records with approved context, reconcile configuration for 97% of supported priority assets and close all severe access findings. No field safety, customer or legal failure should arise from a known missing consolidation record. Search and retrieval time for priority technical cases should fall by 60%, with source retirement independently evidenced.

What the sponsor will measure

• Critical information surviving closure with authority and context intact.
• Installed equipment linked to correct technical and service history.
• Disposal controlled by obligation rather than storage convenience.
• Migration exceptions exposed and resolved before source retirement.
• Sensitive data available only for lawful and operationally necessary use.
• Data teams improving decisions without claiming ownership of business meaning.

The person

You bring 18–22 years in data, engineering information, enterprise architecture or digital leadership within long-lived industrial products. You have governed data through site closure, system decommissioning or major merger and understand configuration, records and installed-base consequence.

Your prior remit should include at least 2,000 employees and partners, millions of technical records or a comparable regulated archive. Evidence must include a source you refused to retire, a configuration error you corrected and defensible disposal. Experience limited to analytics or cloud platforms without controlled technical data is insufficient.

Compensation and terms

The base range is £290,000–390,000 plus annual incentive and long-term incentive linked to record integrity, configuration, consolidation, access and leadership. This permanent onsite Manchester role reports to the Group Chief Executive or designated sponsor and requires site travel. Appointment timing follows the planned closure sequence.

Confidentiality

The business, sites, product records, customers, systems and closure programme are confidential. Detailed inventories follow suitability, conflict clearance and signed confidentiality. Applicants must not contact archive vendors, employees or customers to identify the organisation.