The full story, since you're asking

The Foundation

I started building software in 1996 and spent eleven years across financial services and insurance. At Sungard, I designed global life and pensions insurance platforms deployed across four continents, leading a 50-person team on a pan-Asian programme for New York Life. At JP Morgan, I built global asset rebalancing systems.

I learned early that transformation fails when you treat people as resources to be optimised. And I learned that understanding the problem is always more important than the solution you bring to it.

Community Leadership and Early Consulting

From 2007, I became deeply involved in the agile community's development in the UK. I was an Agile Alliance sponsor, in the first UK cohort for SAFe (trained by Dean Leffingwell), Kanban Master Coach (certified by David Anderson), and one of the first 150 Certified Scrum Professionals worldwide, serving on the 12-person expert panel that reviewed CSP applications. Gerald Weinberg recognised my work, and I completed his Problem Solving Leadership programme in Albuquerque.

During this period I ran Cow Consulting, writing and speaking about what I saw going wrong: the commoditisation of expertise into certifications, frameworks sold as silver bullets, organisations poorly served by the industry around them. I contributed to PRINCE2 Agile and to Agendashift, judged the UK Agile Awards and UK IT Industry Awards, and spoke at Scrum Alliance Global Gathering and Agile Tour London. The industry caught up to the commoditisation critique by 2015. By then I was focused on delivery.

Government and Public Sector

My first government coaching role was at Ordnance Survey in 2011, working with teams developing geospatial software. That led to an invitation to join GDS (Cabinet Office) in 2013, where I coached senior leaders and delivery teams across government under the Digital by Default strategy, strengthening Exemplar programmes including the team that replaced paper driving licence counterparts for 40 million licence holders. I authored "Governance principles for agile service delivery," adopted across UK government, and trained and coached over 200 civil servants in agile practices.

At ESFA, I led a 150-person cross-supplier team and delivered the digital Apprenticeship Service, managing the distribution of £2.7 billion in annual levy funds. Accountable for governance, compliance reporting, and cross-supplier risk management across the programme. At HMRC, I was responsible for agile delivery and dev tooling, managing scrum masters and product owners, and introducing DevOps within the Aspire programme.

Executive Leadership

As VP Engineering at Abcam (AIM-listed life sciences company, £260 million revenue), I owned delivery, engineering, and operations across the UK, China, the US, and the EU. Abcam had delivered double-digit growth for four consecutive years but was stuck entering its fifth. I created the business's first unified technology portfolio, which allowed us to identify and prioritise high-value projects that could drive modernisation of the legacy stack. That included integrating with Oracle Cloud ERP, migrating to AWS (reducing operating costs by 40%), and developing technology partnerships for the Chinese market as we built out the China IT division. Portfolio strategy, vendor partnerships, and team transformation together, not one without the others.

After completing my MSc in Psychology at the University of Strathclyde (Distinction, 2020), researching what pervasive technology does to human cognitive capability, I returned to executive delivery. At Cognizant as Director of Delivery, and then at Travis Perkins (FTSE 250), where I brought together all the group's brands under a single software delivery function for the first time, building capability across UK and Ukraine operations and managing strategic vendor partnerships. When the Ukraine conflict began, I led crisis management including the evacuation of 100 team members while maintaining delivery continuity.

As CEO of Cybersafe Schools, I led a platform helping schools protect children online, evolving the service from a compliance-focused Risk Protection Arrangement to a comprehensive SaaS platform.

beò and What Comes Next

beò is Scottish Gaelic for "alive." beò is a B2B company measuring the cognitive impact of AI adoption on workforces. My MSc research (Hendry, 2020, n=82) found that a widely used smartphone usage scale failed to predict actual device behaviour (r = .198, ns). Organisations are now making the same measurement mistake with AI: satisfaction surveys tell you how people feel about Copilot or ChatGPT, not whether these tools are changing how they think. beò was built to close that gap.

The research directly informs my executive work. Understanding what AI actually does to the way people think, decide, and collaborate makes me a more credible CIO in AI transformation conversations. As CTO, I set the technical direction and the research methodology.

I take on interim and fractional CIO positions: organisations that need someone to take full ownership of the technology estate, diagnose what's actually broken, and fix it. Thirty years across government, financial services, life sciences, and media have given me one clear conviction: the next generation of CIO challenges are about people and technology together, not technology alone. That's what I want to work on.