Trusted Board-level advisor, coach & facilitator in developing and implementing business ICT strategy

You should contact Richard if you are a Board-level executive having to address & master business challenges that require you, as part of your wider responsibilities, to confidently tackle underlying information & communication technology (ICT) agendas.

You should consider engaging Richard to act as your trusted advisor and coach. He is able to bring his wide experience as a businessman, as former Group Vice-President IT for a global multinational, and as former Chairman of the leading European sourcing consultancy.

Richard has an established track record as an independent & perceptive critic of the ICT industry. Contrary to the analysis set out in the now famous article ‘IT Doesn’t Matter’ (May 2003 Harvard Business Review) Richard believes that sustainable competitive ‘edge’ can be created through the effective exploitation of the capabilities of modern ICT - but that the roots of that ‘edge’ do not lie in the technology per se.

Richard’s approach is to work with you, taking a broad, strategic ’10,000ft’ approach to set a framework that will strengthen your ability to effectively direct either internal company resource or external (consultancy, vendor community) resource to ‘tackle the detail’. Richard works in business (rather than ‘techie’) language & approach.

Richard recognises that in many companies responsibility for the (key aspects of) the ICT agenda is diffusing away from the classic IT Director or CIO, and into the hands of other board-level executives who now have to grapple with challenges that are often new and complex to them.

He also recognises that internal (ICT) resource often still tends to be very ‘techie’, with its own agendas to protect. Equally external (consultancy, vendor) resources have their own business agendas to drive (including a significant tendency to load resource & cost into projects whenever they can!).

Outside, in the ICT service sourcing/outsourcing market place, the forces reshaping the vendor community are now quite radical in their impact & need to be better understood in setting up sourcing relationships. Richard’s decade-long experience of the ICT vendor community has given him significant insights into how to build effective sourcing relationships that will underwrite delivery of sustained business value.

Richard’s typical engagement model of is of a committed month-by-month ‘in the background’ role in support of you, working to advise and coach you to confidently tackle the complexity of issues outlined above.