The Role That Does Not Exist Yet
There is a pattern I keep seeing across industries, sectors, company sizes. An organisation reaches a point where technology is no longer a support function. It has become the business. And yet the leadership structure has not caught up.
They post for a CTO. Or a CIO. Or a Head of Digital. The job description reads like a wishlist written by committee: part architect, part strategist, part therapist, part magician. Half the requirements conflict with the other half.
The gap is not technical
The gap is not about which platforms someone knows or how many ERPs they have migrated. The gap is that the role they need sits between strategy and execution, between the board and the build team, between ambition and reality.
It is a role that requires:
- The commercial awareness to sit in a board meeting and translate technology into business language
- The technical depth to challenge a solution architect without bluffing
- The operational discipline to keep production systems running while transforming what sits behind them
- The human judgement to know when to push and when to listen
Most job descriptions pick two of these and ignore the rest.
Why this matters now
The AI wave has made this worse, not better. Every board wants an AI strategy. Very few have someone who can connect that strategy to the operational reality of their technology estate, their data maturity, their team capability, their appetite for change.
The organisations that will thrive are not the ones that adopt AI fastest. They are the ones that adopt it with the clearest understanding of what they are trying to achieve and what they are willing to change to get there.
This is not a technology problem. It is a leadership problem. And until organisations stop hiring for yesterday's role, they will keep solving yesterday's problems.
What I think the answer looks like
The answer is not a bigger title or a broader mandate. It is a leader who can hold complexity without hiding behind it. Someone who can:
- Translate between the boardroom and the engineering floor
- Make technology decisions that serve the business, not the other way around
- Build teams that outlast any single initiative
- Say no to the shiny thing when the fundamentals are not in place
That is the role I have spent twenty years learning to play. And it is the role most organisations do not yet know how to hire for.