The full story, since you're asking
I'm Julie Hendry. FBCS, FRSA, MSc in Psychology, BSc in Computer Studies. Thirty years solving organisational problems by starting with people, not process.
I'm Julie Hendry. FBCS, FRSA, MSc in Psychology, BSc in Computer Studies. Thirty years solving organisational problems by starting with people, not process.
I've worked in technology transformation for over thirty years. Not as a theorist, and not as someone who applies the same framework to every problem. I draw on whatever the situation needs: agile, lean, and kanban where they fit, but also systems thinking, psychological approaches, and organisational theory. The problem is always more important than the solution, because without understanding the problem, any solution is just a new problem.
I started building software in 1996 and spent the next twelve years across financial services, insurance, and media. At Sungard, I designed global life and pensions insurance platforms 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. At the BBC, I contributed to early digital strategy.
I learned early that transformation fails when you treat people as resources to be optimised. And I learned that the problem is always more important than the solution you bring to it.
From 2008, 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. 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.
At GDS (Cabinet Office), I strengthened Exemplar programmes under the Digital by Default strategy, eliminating paper driving licences for 60 million users and saving £15 million annually. I authored "Governance principles for agile service delivery," adopted across UK government, and mentored over 400 civil servants in agile practices.
At ESFA, I led a 150-person cross-supplier team and delivered the digital Apprenticeship Levy, saving UK taxpayers £2.7 billion annually. Accountable for governance, compliance reporting, and cross-supplier risk management across the programme. At HMRC, I was responsible for agile delivery, managing scrum masters and product owners, and introducing DevOps, as part of the £23 billion Aspire programme.
As VP Global Engineering at Abcam (life sciences unicorn, £260 million revenue), I owned architecture, delivery, engineering, and operations across the UK, China, the US, and the EU. Abcam had been promising its market double-digit growth for five years running. I unlocked it through specific technical decisions: implementing Oracle Cloud ERP across financial and procurement operations, adopting MuleSoft Anypoint Platform to replace hand-coded integrations with an API-led architecture (50+ APIs in production, from order processing to payroll), migrating to AWS (reducing operating costs by 40%), and expanding commercial operations into China. Platform architecture, integration strategy, and team transformation together, not one without the others.
At Travis Perkins (FTSE 250), I built software delivery capability across UK and Ukraine operations, managing up to 200 people and leading crisis management during the Ukraine conflict, 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. It was the first time my technology career and my growing interest in what screens do to people converged in the same role.
Between these roles, I completed my MSc in Psychology at the University of Strathclyde (Distinction), researching what pervasive technology does to human cognitive capability. That research directly informed what came next.
Beò is Scottish Gaelic for "alive." Beò is my research practice, focused on the intersection of digital wellbeing, the attention economy, and organisational performance. The premise is straightforward: we can't keep asking people to do deep, complex transformation work while every tool they use is engineered to fragment their attention. Something has to give, and right now it's the quality of the work.
The research directly informs my executive work. Understanding what constant connectivity costs organisations makes me a more effective CIO. As CTO of Beò, I set the technical direction while the research team handles day-to-day operations.
I'm now looking for 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.