What I do and how I do it.
Available for interim and fractional CIO positions with full ownership of the technology estate, accountable to the board. I take on roles where the organisation needs someone to diagnose what's actually broken, build the right team around it, and stay until it's fixed.
Interim engagements typically run 6 to 18 months with full-time exclusivity and executive accountability. Fractional engagements suit organisations that need senior technology leadership but not a full-time hire. Both start the same way: understanding the problem before proposing the solution. Available to start within two weeks of engagement.
Every engagement starts with a diagnostic. What's actually broken? Is it the technology, the team, the governance, the stakeholder relationships, or all four? The first 30 days are about listening, mapping, and understanding before prescribing. I report directly to boards and executive teams on technology risk, investment, and delivery, translating complexity into business impact. Quick wins where they exist, but the real work is structural.
Organisations I've worked with include GDS, Cabinet Office, HMRC, ESFA, Abcam, Travis Perkins, Cybersafe Schools, American Express, JP Morgan, BBC, Barclays, Tesco, Sky, The Guardian, and Royal London. The scale has always been large. The stakes have always been real.
Get in touchAt Travis Perkins (FTSE 250), I built software delivery capability across 200 people in UK and Ukraine operations. When the Ukraine conflict began, I led the evacuation of 100 team members while maintaining delivery continuity. The board needed someone who could manage geopolitical risk, stakeholder communication, and operational resilience simultaneously. That's what interim CIO work actually looks like when it matters.
At Abcam (life sciences unicorn, £260M revenue), I owned architecture, delivery, engineering, and operations across four countries. The company had been promising its market double-digit growth for five years. I unlocked it through specific technical decisions: Oracle Cloud ERP across financial and procurement operations, MuleSoft Anypoint Platform replacing hand-coded integrations with an API-led architecture (50+ APIs in production), AWS migration reducing operating costs by 40%, and expanding commercial operations into China.
Thirty years of going into organisations that are stuck and working out what's actually wrong. Financial services, government, life sciences, media. The common thread is complexity: situations where the standard consulting playbook doesn't work because the problem isn't standard.
I start with people, understand the politics, design the structures, then worry about the process. It's slower to start and faster to finish than the alternative.
About my backgroundMy research into digital wellbeing and the attention economy directly informs my executive work. Understanding what constant connectivity actually 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.
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