Chief Information Officer — Home-Care Division

The mandate

The home-care division has grown through brand acquisition, market expansion and the addition of local product ranges. Its technology landscape reflects that history. Similar commercial processes run on different applications, product and customer identifiers do not reconcile cleanly, and several brand-specific tools depend on small groups of people who understand undocumented interfaces. The portfolio is now being simplified, but business decisions to retire, combine or invest behind brands cannot be implemented safely without understanding which data, controls and services each one uses.

The Chief Information Officer will own that translation. The appointee will lead enterprise applications, infrastructure, workplace technology, architecture, service management, technology risk, data foundations and the internal delivery organisation. Digital consumer products and advanced analytics may sit with other executives, yet the CIO must provide the dependable platforms, interfaces and information controls on which they rely. The role is accountable for technology outcomes, not merely the management of suppliers.

This is an urgent new position created because portfolio simplification has exposed fragmented accountability. The board does not expect a wholesale replacement of the estate. It wants a sequenced architecture in which business choices determine what should converge, remain local for a defined reason, or close. The CIO must be prepared to retain an unfashionable but reliable service when migration risk outweighs benefit, and equally prepared to stop an attractive programme that lacks an operating owner.

Scope and operating context

Based onsite in Amsterdam, the CIO will oversee an ecosystem of approximately 1,275 employees and material partners across the Netherlands and a wider international region. Direct and matrix teams include enterprise architecture, applications, infrastructure, identity, data platforms, service operations, programme delivery and vendor management. Information security maintains independent specialist authority, while the CIO is responsible for embedding its requirements throughout design and operation.

The estate supports demand planning, formulation and product information, manufacturing, quality, procurement, finance, customer management and route-to-market activity. Brand-specific variation is sometimes commercially or regulatorily justified—for example, local label data or a specialist formulation workflow. Elsewhere, differences reflect historic preference or acquisition decisions. The CIO must create evidence that distinguishes those cases and assign an economic owner to every approved exception.

Data is central to the portfolio work. A product may exist under multiple material, pack, claim and market identifiers, with inconsistent lineage to formulation and regulatory records. Customer and vendor masters contain similar duplication. Until those relationships are governed, the division cannot reliably calculate brand economics, transfer inventory, retire an application or determine which records must be retained after a brand closes.

First-year agenda

In the first hundred days, the CIO will establish operational truth. They will map critical business services, applications, interfaces, data domains, vendors, technical debt and current change commitments. The review must expose unsupported components, single-person dependencies, renewal dates and failure consequences. It should also separate contractual spend from the full cost of internal work, reconciliation, incidents and controls.

Alongside this baseline, the CIO will join the brand-portfolio process. For every proposed closure, combination or investment, technology and information dependencies will be identified before dates are announced. A brand exit may require preservation of safety, claims, tax and warranty records; disentanglement of customer permissions; changes to planning and financial hierarchies; and removal from commerce and partner feeds. The executive will make those obligations visible to the accountable business sponsor.

By month six, the board expects a target architecture and funded sequence. Common identity, integration, master-data, finance and service-management capabilities should have explicit standards. Local or brand-specific services will have a documented purpose, owner, cost and review date. Migration waves must be small enough to manage operational risk and timed around product launches, seasonal demand and regulatory commitments rather than technology convenience.

The CIO will also reset delivery governance. Programmes will have named business owners, measurable adoption, credible total cost and clear exit criteria. Independent assurance will be focused on the riskiest assumptions, while routine decisions move faster through established guardrails. Vendors must provide service transparency, knowledge transfer and orderly transition rights; important capability cannot remain locked inside a commercial relationship.

Within twelve months, the division should have retired a meaningful set of low-value applications and interfaces, improved product-data ownership, reduced severe service instability and begun the highest-confidence migrations. Portfolio leaders should be able to see the technology and record-retention consequences of their choices before committing them. Benefits will be counted only when costs, workarounds or material risk genuinely leave the system.

Leadership responsibilities

The CIO will run technology as an accountable operating function. They will set service expectations, chair investment choices, maintain asset and risk transparency and ensure incidents result in learning and control improvement. Executive reporting should focus on customer, colleague, factory and decision consequences, supported by technical facts rather than obscured by them.

The role will reshape the internal organisation. Critical architecture, product ownership, supplier-management and data-accountability skills should sit where the division can exercise informed control. Commodity capacity may remain external. The CIO will assess leaders, strengthen succession and create career paths that reward service ownership and simplification, not the accumulation of applications.

Partnership with business executives is essential but does not remove the CIO's duty to challenge. They must refuse launch dates that ignore migration evidence, confront functions that preserve local variation without funding it and make cyber or continuity implications explicit. In return, technology teams will be expected to understand operating context and present feasible alternatives rather than issue unexplained prohibitions.

Measures of success

The executive committee will review availability and recovery of critical services, severe-incident trends, change failure, vulnerability and control remediation, vendor performance, run-versus-change cost and delivery predictability. Simplification measures will include applications and interfaces retired, duplicate records resolved, exception ownership, technical-debt reduction and savings actually removed from budgets or contracts.

Business outcomes will include faster portfolio decisions, cleaner product and financial hierarchies, fewer manual reconciliations and safe completion of brand transitions. Adoption and user effort will be tracked for new workflows. A programme delivered on schedule but followed by shadow processes, unstable service or unplanned support cost will not be declared successful.

Candidate profile

Candidates should bring 22–28 years of technology leadership in consumer goods, manufacturing, retail, life sciences or another product-led international environment. They must have held substantial accountability for both operational service and transformation across countries. Experience integrating acquisitions, separating or closing brands, and governing product or material data is especially relevant.

The board expects evidence of making architecture choices under real commercial constraints. Candidates should be able to explain which systems they retained, which they retired, how they discovered hidden dependencies and how benefits reached the operating account. Leadership of major external providers and development of strong internal product, architecture and service owners are mandatory.

The CIO needs enough technical depth to test assumptions without becoming the principal designer. They must communicate clearly with factories, brand leaders, finance, risk specialists and the board, and remain calm during serious incidents. Experience across European data, labour and regulatory contexts is preferred, together with the judgement to distinguish legal necessity from habitual localisation.

Compensation and appointment terms

The indicative base is EUR 285,000–390,000, with annual incentive and long-term participation linked to reliable simplification and enterprise value. Exact positioning will reflect relevant scale, technical leadership and the candidate's current arrangements. Any relocation or treatment of forfeited awards will be considered through a separate documented decision.

Confidentiality

The division's identity is concealed because the role intersects with unannounced portfolio choices, supplier contracts and technology vulnerabilities. Shortlisted candidates will receive progressively detailed information after identity, conflict and confidentiality checks. Applications should not include security findings, proprietary architecture diagrams or identifiable separation plans from other organisations.