Speaking

I’m available to speak on the decisions technology leaders face today, which I see first-hand across engagements as a Field CTO. My background covers twenty-five years in financial services, defence, retail, and the data platform industry.

Topics

AI adoption you can govern. Most organisations have plenty of enthusiasm for AI, so the harder question is how to adopt it while keeping the rigour they already apply to the rest of their engineering. A talk on this covers how to govern AI-assisted development, and the verification and compensating controls that let a team trust what the tools produce. My writing on this includes Beyond Vibe Coding, and my governance self-assessment gives an audience a quick way to score their own organisation.

Modernising the platforms you already run. Modernisation programmes tend to run into the same choices, such as Kubernetes or serverless and whether to build or buy, along with the harder question of when a working system is best left well alone. I’d focus on decisions that your own teams can operate and support for years after the programme finishes.

Cloud strategy in regulated environments. This covers how cloud strategy changes when security and audit are part of the design from the first day, drawing on my work in financial services and defence.

Bridging engineering and the business. The aim is for a board and its engineering teams to make decisions from the same facts, which means explaining technical complexity to the board and commercial reality to the engineers. It also includes making the case for technical investment in business terms, and setting up a product function that gives platform teams a clear direction.

Interested?

If any of this fits your event or your leadership team, get in touch or message me on LinkedIn. I’m based in the UK and happy to travel or join remotely.