Board appointments

The short version

Thirty-nine years in technology across more than twenty UK sectors, from computer operator to Group CTO. A former CISO. Currently running an independent fractional and advisory practice — fractional CTO and CIO work, technology due diligence, AI governance, and interim leadership — alongside three published books on technology, judgement, and digital risk.

I am looking for one or two non-executive appointments where that combination is useful: boards facing AI adoption, an acquisition, a transformation programme, or a regulatory change that has made technology a governance question rather than an operational one.

The problem this addresses

Technology reaches most boards as a finished recommendation. The executive team has done the work, chosen the direction, and arrived asking for approval. The board's view of its own technology position rests entirely on what the executive team decided to present.

That is not a failure of the executive team. It is what happens when nobody at the table can ask the second question — the one that follows the answer. Boards in that position do not discover the gap until a regulator, an insurer, or an acquirer asks to see the working.

What changes with the right non-executive in the room is not the volume of technology discussion. It is that the board starts making decisions instead of approving them, with the trade-offs named before they are authorised rather than after they have matured.

Where the experience comes from

The work below is what a nominations committee would want to test. It is the same record set out in full on the about page.

Committee fit

Audit and risk. Cyber resilience, data sovereignty, vendor and concentration dependency, and whether the technology risks on the register are the ones that would actually cause the loss.

Technology or AI oversight. What the organisation is deploying, under what controls, who owns the risk, and what the board should be asking at every future decision. Governance that goes further than a policy document.

Transaction scrutiny. Independent assessment of a target's technology position inside the deal window, and of whether the integration plan survives contact with the two estates as they actually are.

What this is not

A nominations committee is better served by knowing the limits up front.

• This would be a first non-executive directorship. The governance experience is real and sits alongside board and executive committee work from the other side of the table; the seat itself would be new.
• I am not a lawyer or an accountant. I will not chair an audit committee, and I would expect the financial and legal expertise on the board to be held by people who hold it properly.
• I am not a technologist brought in to sit through meetings. If the requirement is technical assurance on delivery, that is a different appointment and probably a different person.
• I will not be quiet about human consequence. If a recommendation excludes people or transfers risk onto the person least able to carry it, I will say so in the meeting rather than in the minutes.

Independence

The practice trades under my own name and has no single primary client, no platform to sell, and no vendor relationship behind any recommendation. Conflicts would be declared and managed in the ordinary way; the current portfolio is set out on the about page and can be discussed in full.

I write publicly, under my own name, about technology and its human consequences. That is not a side activity to be managed — it is part of what a board would be appointing. It also means my views on AI governance are already on the record and can be read before any conversation.