We talk to four senior technology executives who have just left their CIO roles. They reflect on the successes they had, their missteps, what they learned with the benefit of hindsight, and how they will apply these lessons in the future.
Roisin Parkes, who was made redundant in February as CTO at Gumtree says when she joined the organisation just over four years ago, she underestimated how difficult and different decision-making would be when part of a leadership team that doesn't necessarily have a technology background.
Jeremy Francis last month left the CIO role at Pepper Financial Services for his first chief operating officer role at Genworth Financial Services.
He says when Genworth first called him about the job, he felt he wasn't the right fit with his technology experience. He says the financial services sector is seeing a shift where senior technology executives are being asked to step into these operational roles.
Ursula Phillips just left her job as group chief information officer at Real Pet Food Company. She discusses her success in getting 30 major technology implementations over the line and building a new tech team at the organisation.
Phillips says she learned some key lessons around taking stakeholders on the transformation journey and making sure that whilst projects often have a technology component, they usually succeeded or fail on business adoption and processes. A real learning, she says, is making sure as a tech leader, you have business engagement up front and that his buy-in stays all the way through a project.
Finally, Andy Luiskandl spent the second half of 2020 as as head of information technology at healthcare provider, Healius. He describes his role as a ''journey through no man's land.'
