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Interim too

1d ago 46:45

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In this episode, Chris and Nick continue discussions about the world of interim management and welcome Rebecca Fox to discuss her extensive experience across public and private sectors. Rebecca shares candid insights about the realities of interim work, emphasising that there’s no time for a hundred-day plan—it’s all about a day-one approach. She explains how interim leaders must quickly fill leadership voids, build trust, and create certainty in organisations facing strategic misalignment or transition. The conversation explores the relentless pace of modern CIO roles, the importance of commercial awareness, and why technology leaders must focus on outcomes that drive revenue, grow margins, or reduce risk rather than just managing technology for its own sake.

The discussion shifts to broader challenges facing technology leaders today, including the pressures of cost optimisation in PE-backed and public companies, the increasing complexity created by SaaS proliferation, and concerns about AI adding another layer of complexity without addressing underlying process issues. Rebecca argues that organizations need to simplify before layering on AI capabilities, warning that simply bolting AI onto complicated legacy processes will create bigger problems down the road. The group discusses how AI might represent an opportunity for smaller, more agile organisations while larger companies struggle with vested interests and accumulated technical debt.

Show transcript, automatically generated by Descript (so forgive errors etc).

Chris: Hello and welcome to episode 3, 3

6 of WB 40, the weekly podcast with me, Chris Weston. Nick Drage. And this week Rebecca Fox. I.

Well, welcome

to WB 41, episode number 3, 3 6. We, we, we’ve got Nick and Rebecca, but our first day I’m gonna ask Nick, how are you doing, Nick?

Long time no. See. What’s your week been like?

Nick: I’m doing well. Just for the discussion I’ve been for the last week, I’ve been I’ve been vibe, coding, vibe, sorry, vibe coding, a bash script, just to run a stone, a survival game and see if, see if it’s actually gonna work. So it’s like a, it’s like a Monte Carlo simulation of the game rather than trying to play a card game like 2000 times just from the script.

So that’s what I’ve been up to for the last week.

Chris: Wow, that’s a whole week of trying to quite make a bash grip. Is that, is that, is that the right, is that the right tech tool for this? But isn’t AI

Rebecca: also supposed to make things quite quick as well? If it’s taken a whole week to do, it isn’t, isn’t AI smashing?

Nick: I, I have, Jesus, this is, this has started earlier. I have been doing other things in the last week, but that’s, that, that, that would be, that would be the highlight, but also. It’s been interesting to see how slow the process is in that. I’m like 90% of no sort of the way there with how the logic of a program should work.

But still, it’s something I’ve done so regularly that I, I catch myself out and can sort of waste hours. I’m just making mistake.

Rebecca: How many prompts did it get you to where you are now with this, with this bit of vibe? Oh, like like six. Okay. I think you’ve said about 600. ’cause you could have probably just written the code quicker then, right?

Nick: See, well that would assume that one I know bash scripting, which I know enough to get it, like only slightly wrong. And two, I’m, I’m very much not a natural developer. Like the, the big stuff I can do quite well. The detail of make sure this punctuation is here or use spaces in this kinda line, but not that kinda line.

Is, it feels like it’s designed specifically to trip me up. So that’s why it’s basically a case of asking the lille, what does this look like? Copy and paste that in, rename the variables. Take it from there.

Chris: Absolutely. It is designed

Nick: to,

Chris: to catch you out Anyway, so but, so yeah, so we, we heard Rebecca there.

So Rebecca, welcome to the podcast, Rebecca Fox

Rebecca: to see you. Thank you. Thank you, thank you so much for the invitation. So last week, I, last week was actually pretty exciting. I went to an evening dinner on Tuesday. Which is great. Spon sponsored. It’s always nice to have a free dinner, which is talking about Ned how to become a ned, which I, I did a, a course on last year, but also being part of a foot C two 50 doing an NED stuff, but a really busy job that I’m currently exiting.

You know, love to get a ned well and some fractional work. And then on. Thursday actually, my, my partner Hayley and I did a workshop as part of Manchester Tech Festival, which was great the first time. We’ve done a workshop together and interesting enough, we are still together after doing that workshop.

So I’m very proud of us both for, for surviving. That and also well, we’ll talk about next week. And then this weekend we’re super exciting. My son’s just bought a house. My son’s 29. He’s just bought a house, so me and he went to see him and see what he’s bought and help him in able clean it and do all the little jobs that that he couldn’t do.

And I’m sure there’s lots more work to do. So it’s been a really exciting and busy week last week. So yeah, it’s been great.

Chris: That is a busy week and yes, you know, team handling a kind of a presentation can be a bit stressful. And Matt and I have done it actually. And you know, we we’re not, we’re not partners in that sense, but, you know, we’ve been together a long time and we’ve and we, you’re still

Speaker 2: partners.

Chris: We’ve never, we’ve never fallen out. You know, the, the, the, the relationship has, has, has, has remained, but yeah, that’s, that’s a difficult one. And then of course, houses so, you know, so this week for example, I. Actually my daughter came back from university. She’s only been there two, two weeks, which came back to pick something up or something.

So I had that going on with you know, people going after university and, and new, new thing, new, new, new things. But I also did the UK IT leaders event in Manchester last week, which was nice because quite a lot of our Midlands tech leaders contingent were there. They made the. Arduous and app perilous journey at the M six to Manchester to to get there.

And also, you know, met up with a, you know, a lot of people that I haven’t seen for a while which is always nice, isn’t it? And met a few new people as well. So, you know, new friends and new acquaintances are always welcome. So yeah, last week was pretty, pretty busy and busy work-wise as well. We, it’s one of those, it’s a funny time in business at the minute.

A lot of it is a bit soft and people are struggling a bit, and again, we still talk to lots of people who are looking for work in, for CIOs or leadership type roles in it that, you know might not have been expecting to take so long to look for, look for a role. It, you know, it’s, it’s definitely. A tricky market, but it’s not dead by any means.

And in terms of what we are doing, yeah, it’s, it’s busy. There’s lots of stuff going on, and I know lots of people who have exited a job and found a job really quickly as well. So I think it’s just one of those, it’s a, it’s a softish market, but yeah. Interesting stuff going on. So it was a, yeah, it.

Rebecca: It was nice to see Manchester features part of it leaders as well, by the way, you know, I, I, I live in Manchester and it’s an absolutely amazing city.

Chris: is. It’s you know, it’s, it’s a, it’s got a good claim to be the, the fourth or third city in the country. And that’s you know, that’s good. You got Birmingham as the second city, obviously mean. It’s the fourth city, obviously it’s, it’s

Rebecca: before London, Manchester, come

Chris: on. Yeah, maybe. All right. And that I, I, I, I understand the point of view, but you know Yes.

Fair enough. We, we won’t, we won’t go down. We beyond that route. But yeah, good week and I’m glad everybody’s had a good time. So what we’re gonna do is we, we’re gonna talk in a moment about interim CIO work. We had a conversation with Duncan. Stop. A couple of weeks ago about, about interim work in general.

And because Rebecca is, has been a, a regular interim and even went into a current permanent role on an interim basis, and as we talked about with sometimes, sometimes that turns permanent we’re gonna talk about that and how it’s changed over the last few years and Rebecca’s experience in that. So

Speaker 2: I’ll see you in a second.

So then Rebecca, a fair,

Chris: a fair chunk of time in interim in public sector, private sector. We talked with Duncan a few weeks, a couple of weeks ago about, about the kind of mentality of, of, of people going into interim and the kind, you know, they don’t necessarily have the time to, to sort of sit down and, and come up with a hundred day plan and all that kind of thing.

How, how has you, how have, have you approached this over the years? Would you agree with that? Is it something you just sort of, you know, get in and crack on with?

Rebecca: I really enjoyed that to the podcast with, with Duncan. I, I listened to it and I, I guess the one thing I didn’t do that I, I did do that Duncan doesn’t do, is he, he, I took the perm job, right?

I took the perm job at NCC. I’ve been there for three months, took the perm CEO gig and I don’t regret it after four years. It was, it’s generally been a brilliant experience. You. Left it now, leaving it now. But there’s no a hundred day plan as a, as an interim you, it’s a day one plan. Right. You, your day one plan.

You, you, I remember one kick, I I, I joined. It’s like there, there was a fire in the server room, you know, a server room 200 before I joined it. It’s just like, oh my goodness, what you are walking into. But what you are walking into is. Not necessarily chaos as such, but you walk into a place where people aren’t sure which direction to go in.

The people aren’t sure. There’s often no strategy or the strategy doesn’t have full support of, of, of the board. You’re not going to chaos often, but you’re going into a lot of uncertainty and I think your job as an interim is to create that certainty, whether that’s strategic certainty or not, it’s about creating that certainty to give the people in the, in the technology team, whatever team you’re looking after.

Some reassurance, and it’s also to make sure you’re giving confidence to the, to the board, to your boss, whoever that may be. There is no day under plan as a, as an interim. There’s just a day one plan. You, you take it from there and you are agile, your fleet of foot, you’ve got great leadership skills, you’ve got a great overview of what going on with technology, and you are very commercially aligned.

I think if you do those things, you probably can’t go wrong.

Chris: And we, and we, we also talked about the fact that as an interim, you’re probably going into another situation, which is. Not necessarily the happiest, either somebody’s been exited be for whatever reason. And they probably, you know, often it’s not entirely their fault.

You know, there’s, there’s, there’s communication issues or trust issues that, that have happened, you know, or somebody’s left, you know precipitously. And again, that’s, that, that also may be because of the, of, of a situation in that business. And as a CIO, one of the things that you do. I have to be thinking about is strategic things.

You wanna understand the business, you want us to understand the, what they’re trying to achieve as a, you know, strategically how technology plays a part in that and all of that. But when you go into that kind of situation, tactical stuff tends to be, you know, a bit like a fire in the server room, right?

It’s like, what do I need to do, as you say today, one my day, one stuff. So how’s that work in terms of working? Enough with those high level stakeholders so that the strategy doesn’t flander, but also being able to pick up those sort of day to day, you know, let, let’s find out what on Earth’s going on here, things.

Rebecca: Yeah, you, you, you do, you do get a little bit of, of leeway. No one’s expecting you to fix the strategy on day one, right? It, it’s that, that will never happen because they know that you haven’t, you don’t know the business, right? That’s, you know, it’s never gonna happen that way. But what they do expect you to do is fill that vacuum and that void of leadership, which clearly has pretty much 99% of the time left as someone’s left the organization, you know, fairly rapidly.

You know, for whatever reason, you know, you know, typically, as you say, it’s because there’s a misalignment of, of direction probably between the CIO and, and their boss, ideally the CEO, it’s their boss, but the, some kind of misalignment or, you know, that’s, that’s what happens. And the reality is that’s okay, right?

People. Don’t need to get on with each other. People do have disagreements and hopefully, you know, it’s works out really well in the end for, for that person leaving. But as a, as an interim, you’ve, you’ve gotta go in and, and fix that void. Fill that void as quickly as possible and build trust with everybody as quick as possible.

And, you know, technology, yeah, it’s about technology, but fundamentally it’s all about people, right? So you get the people bit, right? Actually the technology just flows just flows behind it in my view. At some point you do have to step over and do the technology, but the people thing for me is the absolute first thing.

You’ve got to get absolutely spot on.

Chris: Yes. The, as you say, often that leadership part is, to be honest, I think it’s missed by a lot of people in permanent roles, incident roles anyway. So I mean, the leadership part is, is often lacking where you need to give people a kind of, okay, folks. I see, I see where, where you are.

But you know, tomorrow we’re gonna be here and the next day we’re gonna be here and we’re going to get to a point where we can start to make some different decisions. And giving people that kind of, I guess, confidence that you are gonna be able to achieve some of those things. That, that to me is, is really important.

That word, that leadership word. I think we don’t use it enough, if I’m honest. I, I,

Rebecca: I don’t think we do. And I, and I, I, I do, I do see and feel it changing. But the, the reality is, is, is for far too long, by the way, and I’m, I’m, I’m a massive believer that that technology leaders or whatever domain you work in, whether it’s finance or marketing or wherever it is in the organization, does need someone in that leadership position to have, I’m not saying exclusively come up through the ranks, but do actually have some technical understanding, whatever discipline that was for you to lead that function.

I, I, I, you know, I’ve, I’ve, I’ve worked with people, you know, above me when I was younger who didn’t have that technical discipline, and they don’t fully get the picture. I think it’s absolutely essential. You do get it, but then of course you then still also learn those leadership and those people skills that, you know, sometimes is lacking in people with, with technical backgrounds, right?

Of any technical background, whether it’s finance or marketing. Some people aren’t, aren’t leaders, but I think it’s absolutely essential to. Understand the, the basics and then then be a leader on top. I think if you’re a leader first and then technical second, I don’t really think that works. And I, I don’t really think that works really when you go into an interim role, especially because you do have to not panic about the technology, focus on the people first, then focus on the technology.

And I also think that, you know, we, we, we talk about perm roles and we talk about. Now the, the pace of change that we go through right now in, in, in the, in the business world. Yeah. The, the economy kind of feels a little bit soft. It does feel rather relentless every day. And I, and I do think often the expectations of a PERM employee now seems pretty similar actually, to an interim.

People are expected to deliver quickly, respond quicker than ever. You know, maybe it’s not quite the relentlessness of an interim, but people do need to react with urgency and pace. And actually when they don’t actually, maybe that’s why they’re exited. And when interim’s brought in, right?

Chris: Yeah.

But

Rebecca: to do, yeah,

Chris: I, I get that.

Absolutely. And I think, you know, the, the, the, the days of people working for companies for 10, 15 years, you know, are, are rarer and rarer. But when you’re an interim, one of the things that you are definitely doing or you should be doing, you know, or I say I should be doing one of the things that will be on your mind.

Is how do I, how do I exit? You know, how do I leave this in a situation where I can be replaced? Whereas if you’re going into a role that’s permanent, that’s probably not, you know, the, the first thing on your mind and, and probably shouldn’t be because you’ve got, we need to have a slightly longer yeah.

View of that. Would you, would you agree with that?

Rebecca: No, I, I, I definitely, I definitely agree. The, the one, the one thing I, I probably would disagree on is I think, you know, doing a, doing a CXO XO role is exhausting, right? Sometimes you do need to have a break in your career, and I think, I think there’s, I.

You’ve got to go back to thinking about your health and wellbeing and actually no. Do doing a, a role of that level for any period of time takes a big chunk out of it. Yeah. You may get greater salary, that’s brilliant. And some Mel tips, but it is quite exhausting. Right. And actually, how do you. Maintain that year after year, after year, after year after year.

I know four years of doing group CEO for a FSE two 50 is exhausting. And I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the last few months of I’ve been on gardening leave and that it’s been great. And I, you know, I’m, I, I, you know, took a bold, brave decision that I didn’t wanna be there. Anymore. Not because I didn’t enjoy what I was doing or the people I worked with, but you know, sometimes you just need a God break.

Sorry. Goodness. Break whatever you wanna cross out that, by the way. Edit that out. Thanks. I think our, our,

Chris: our listeners won’t be coaching their pearls at

Rebecca: that. You, you just, you just need to give yourself a break. And, and I’ve certainly learned that in terms of, you know, looking after myself, you know, you’ve got to look after your mental health.

You’ve gotta look after your physical health. ’cause if you can’t, you can’t perform at your best. You can’t perform at your main game. You know, and you need to do that. If you’re not doing that at a, at a, at a, at a CXO level, whatever that is, C-T-O-C-I-O-C-M-O-C-P-O, whatever it is, CDO, you’re not doing the best you can, right.

You’ve gotta factor that into your career, I think. And, and, you know, interim is, you know, no different, right? You, you factor in a, in a break because it definitely is more relentless when you’re doing interim. ‘Cause you’ve gotta be absolutely on it. You maybe got a little bit of a leeway as a per rail, but I don’t think there’s that much difference now in the, in the, in the organization’s requirements of what’s needed from a CIO you know, technology and data underpins every single organization.

If I think about. What has changed in the last 10 years Without technology and data, every single organization would not exist pretty much. And actually that has changed the pace of that usage is there.

Chris: Yeah, I used to say that once upon a time. I’d say that, you know, when I started my career and even quite the way through it you could lose your compute systems for a couple of days, and as long as their business isn’t.

Like, like completely white collar, you know, working in engineering and manufacturing, things like that. You know, you, you, you, you could get away with it. It wasn’t good, but you could, you could recover. Whereas now it’s essentially, you know, death if you, if you do that and j lr and, and

Rebecca: we see. Okay. So we see every day with, with with cybersecurity.

Right. You know, and, you know, that is raised at the agenda because you know, it, and technology is, is so fundamental to every single organization, you know, even when it isn’t the core business. Right. And it’s never been like that more now than ev you know, literally 10 years ago it was kind of there, but it wasn’t.

But now it absolutely is. We should be running the show, right. As CIOs. That’s what I think. Too far.

Chris: No, I don’t think it’s too far. I, I think rather you, than me, frankly. There’s, there’s a, there’s a reason why I don’t even do a CIO role anymore. Right. There’s, there’s, as you say, sometimes you just have to say, you know, I don’t wanna do that anymore.

But you’re right. I mean, there’s a lot of there’s a lot of good skills out there and a lot of, you know, the CIO is, I always say you TIO role, technology roles generally are the best role roles in the company, right? You get to see across the whole company. You get pretty well paid compared to everybody else.

You get to play with cool technology and, and talk to cool people, right? People just stop complaining. I dunno whether you agree with that. Nick.

Nick: Interest, interesting points made lot of thoughts of that in that technology and data is the foundation for everything. Ah. But also the, the half thought I had is ’cause it’s so ubiquitous, it’s therefore not that special.

It’s just something else that should be relatively dependable and relatively automated. Like finance, like power, like, like little electricity, is that kind of thing should be at the stage where you don’t need a specific person in the C-suite. To manage it. I mean, I dunno whether this will go down well or badly with you too, but I often think that what the, what the C-suite should be doing a lot is off on golf courses, playing golf, thinking, waiting for ideas to come up rather like you’ve, you’ve said sort of specifically Rebecca, sort of being on it immediately when actually I think at that level you should have a lot more free time for a lot more.

Strategic thought and the people beneath you should be the ones that can do that. That feels, that feels sort of as a, that that feels like a problem, but that’s only a half considered thought, so I dunno what the answer is. I’m hoping shut it up and handing over to you. You are gonna give me the answer to my half considered thought.

Well.

Rebecca: First of all, I don’t play golf, so that wouldn’t be a, wouldn’t be an option for me, but, but what I would say, I think maybe that is the case or was the case a few years ago, right when the economy wasn’t as tight, when people weren’t constantly doing cost out programs. You know, you know, I think that probably was the case and it felt like we had more time to to, to do those things.

And think the reality is, is, is twofold. First of all, the economy doesn’t allow that to happen. Everything is really tight on cost. Whatever organization you work in, whether it’s cash rich or not, it’s all about cost and ebitda. Simple as that. And, and I think that’s just what’s expected of, whether it’s in the Foote or PE or obviously that’s just what’s expected.

So I don’t, I don’t think there’s often that time for that extra, extra bits, which is maybe the, the golf thing a couple of days a week. The other thing is, if we go back to technology, and I’m gonna compare technology to finance, right? I don’t think the basic principles of accounting and finance have changed that much in the last a hundred years.

We’re fully to get a CFO on here. Nick and Chris, just to validate that, but when I spoke to a finance person a couple weeks ago, I said, Rebecca, you know that, you know, the, the, the, the, the basic principles of finance haven’t changed. You can argue the basic principles of technology haven’t changed the last, you know, a hundred years either.

But, but the reality is they have moved at a much more significant pace and increasingly do so. And based on the last comment that all businesses now are built on data and technology, we haven’t got time. We literally have got to keep ahead of the game, ahead of the curve more than ever before. And we haven’t properly mentioned AI in this conversation.

I think, I think that’s the first time mentioning AI in this podcast. But you know, that only just accelerates stuff, right? You know, it, it is just relentless and that’s making the business relentless. And I would even say that AI is probably the one bit of technology that has come around, certainly in my lifetime.

That genuinely puts the power in the hands of the business. Whether it’s used or wisely or not, I don’t know. But it genuinely will put the how hands of the power in the business and possibly circumnavigate it to some extent. But actually if it does, it does it at its peril. Because actually we all know that AI is built on data.

We know that ai, you know, is inherently probably insecure. And actually, if it doesn’t have some oversight and expertise coming from the people in the technology and the data function, then we can have a bigger mess in what we often feel like we have now in technology functions. It’s just we have so much complexity, partly down to SaaS, partly down to other things too.

Probably lack of leadership from, from ai, from from IT leaders. You know, AI is gonna. Feel like it’s chaos, right.

Chris: I think, yeah, I think that’s, that’s a good point. Alright. I, I’m gonna indulge myself for a moment now. Going back to the point you made about finance not changing and technology changing quickly, I wonder, so, no.

Yeah. I mean, finance hasn’t changed. Obviously. There’s, there’s still, nobody’s gonna keep their ledgers and, you know, you sell things and you buy things. You mentioned ebitda, and I think that is a measure that has become important in the last 20 years. I don’t remember people talking about EBITDA back in my earlier days.

Maybe

Rebecca: they’re right.

Chris: And the reason that people talk about EBITDA is partly because so many companies are now pe, PE owned, and the reason they’re doing cost and all the time is because they’re passing, you know, they’re, they’re, they’re flipping the company every few years that they, you know, they’re taking there.

They’re biting into the neck, they’re draining out as much blood as they can, and then they pass it onto the next one until, until the, the, you know, lifeless Huss gets thrown on the on the scrappy Right. And the checker takes all the pain. So what’s, is

Rebecca: that part of the check you think? Just a quick cut.

It’s a bit like pass the parcel. Right. But you don’t wanna be the last one to have the parcel. Right. There is no private end. Right. It’s got chairs. Yeah. Yeah, it’s musical jazz. I think, I think it, I think possibly is right, and whether it’s, whether you, you’re working for a fse, a public listed company, or whether you’re working for a pe I think it is, right?

I think there’s more pressure on everybody. You know, as much as we, we, you know, we, we all have ESG targets. Absolutely. I think that’s a really important thing to do. But certainly when the economy is tight, it is all about ebit, right? There is no. There is no fun and there is no joy. Sometimes it literally is just relentless, what’s right for the business.

Chris: Yeah. And, and sometimes that gets in the way of thinking about what’s right for the customer. Right? And why, why are we even here? Because are we here to serve the customer and or are we here to return value to to shareholders? Well, I would say the two things going hand, hand in hand, but.

The.

Rebecca: I, I think, I think it depends on where we are with the economic cycle, right? And whether it’s a cycle of seven years, 10 years, whatever we, we agree on right now, that cycle feels like it’s a a stagnant cycle. Whether is, is is little growth or growth that’s not really catching up with you know, inflation and, you know, just feel like that.

And that’s on the back of COVID and or whether it is COVID or whether it’s on the back of the financial crisis in 2007. I.

Got to be really, really mindful of stuff and yeah, you do see some organizations that are. Throwing more cash around than, than before. But also COVID has changed how we work, right? We’ve got a whole lot of real estate that isn’t, isn’t filled. So how do we now, how do we even justify that, right? Having offices that people aren’t in every day or not in on a, on a Monday and a Friday, and there’s loads of stuff that we just don’t know any, this big economic thing.

What I would say is A, as an IT leader, if this is you listening, is you’ve gotta be much more commercially aware If you don’t think you are. ’cause your job isn’t just data and technology. Your job is business. Your job is understanding commerciality and the direct impact that you have running your function, turning those binary naughts and wands and your data and your AI and your technology into sound commercial outcomes based on, you know, driving revenue, growing margins, or reducing risk.

And if you are doing something that doesn’t impact one of those levers, you’re in the wrong job.

Chris: Oh, that’s a good point. And, and I, and, i’ll come away from that. You, you, you press one of my buttons and I end up, I end up, oh. Which, which button

Rebecca: did I press?

Chris: Chris, come on. Yeah, come on Chris. Mention and, and I and yeah, I mean, I’ve seen too far, too many times I’ve seen, you know, people lose focus on what it means to be in business at all.

What is the point of being a, of here? What are we doing for our customer? But no, I actually, I think what you said there, that brings us back to you. The, the, the thing we must always mention nowadays, which is AI and how lots of businesses suddenly want, you know, they, they, they’ve got, there’s a bit of a, oh my word, this is it.

And agent ai and all of these things, they will say, we will reduce our back office functions. They will mean that we’re gonna be lean and mean and we’re gonna be automated and everything’s gonna be there. It’s not. I, no, I take issue with, with that. I don’t actually think that’s the best use of the technology personally.

I, you know, I think it’s better to add value than to re What,

Rebecca: what do you think the best use of the technology is? Nick?

Chris: Really? Yeah. No. Well, so you don’t let, let.

Nick: Yeah, let, let me jump in. ’cause I think that’s a, a really key point in that, especially with record. As you said earlier, the technology is fundamentally insecure, which I think it is in multiple ways and like, like arguably it’s frac, argu, arguably it’s fractally insecure.

Like, would you ever level, you look at it, there’s a problem, and if you zoom out or zoom in, there’s still problems. I think it does. Amazing things as per, before we start the recording, sort of, you know, is it, is, can it be a colleague? I think in a way it can, the way the whole, the whole I am, I am laughing at the thumbs down.

I’m being given by Rebecca For the audience At home or on your jogging or at work or whatever. Yeah. A colleague, never a colleague. No, I th I, I think with the whole second brain idea, like you said, about life and business becoming more stressful and faster, the number of people who are depending on. Sort of external facilities more than just sort of, I’ll, I’ll keep a notebook sort of thing.

The whole settle cast idea and so on. I think LLMs figure into that and you can, there’s, there’s something about talking to something else that talks back. It’s not like as per rubber duck programming and so on, there’s, there’s something about that, that LLMs are capable of now that computers weren’t before.

So I think there’s something here. I don’t think it’s worth the investment and. Let me sort of brush over and say the, the, the penalties it’s incurring. And also, like Chris was just saying, I think there’s a lot of functionality where it’s being forced in and you’re like, this is, this is the wrong kind of computing being used for that.

You are, you are, you should be looking for something, some kind of simpler automation rather than it feels like it’s a GI because it talks back to you and. And just because it feels that way doesn’t mean it’s actually useful that way, is what I would say in answer to that question.

Chris: Yeah. And the, the only point I would make on the, on the on the, what’s it good for is that it, it’s being seen as a way to cut costs right now.

And I think it’s much better adding value and, and making, and making you more, you know, so for your pound, you can add more value to your customer through your value chain. Than you could before. I don’t think it’s very good at cutting costs. I think there are cost cutting elements, but, but at the moment, because you can’t give it decisions to make really of any importance, it’s more of a, it’s more of a multiplier and a value add that, you know, help you do a better job for the same cost and the same effort than you could before, I think.

But Rebecca, I’m, I’m keen to hear

Rebecca: your view. Hmm. Well see, I, I think it goes back to this thing, right? We, we’ve, we’ve, we’ve gone through this, this SAS phase, haven’t we? Where we’ve ripped out all our, our things that we could just sweat the assets on our ERPs, our CRM, and we’ve, we’ve now put all these swanky.

SaaS products, you know, that, to be fair, like some of them are 15 years old and they’re still looking as cranky as the on-prem stuff. Right? And the difference between that and and on-prem stuff of many years ago is you have to keep paying for them every month. Right? And yet, and we’re just not getting the value.

And I think your point Chris, about the value chain is absolutely crucial. Understanding your flow of. You know, the flow of process of how you create a business, how your business runs for value chain is absolutely essential. And I think a lot of those have got very complicated. Partly because of underpinning technology has got more complicated.

We just bolted more stuff on SAS hasn’t helped. And I think now what we’re gonna go into this thing is we haven’t fixed those processes. We’re now just gonna put this magic bullet of AI on top, which is gonna lay another lot of complexity on there. It’s gonna be hard, right? For, for anybody in technology leadership to say, no, we’re not gonna do that With all the hype that goes around it, but also knowing it’s gonna be a quick fix, potentially.

Right? And the reality is, the only fix to this really is to simplify the whole lot. Just strip it back to its bare bones, and then maybe layer some AI on it. But if you’ve just got a complex problem that needs to be simplified and you’re just making it more complicated. Yeah, it might fix it temporarily, but you know what?

In five, 10 years time, you’d be paying for your SaaS product and you’d be paying for your AI on top, and your data will be in a worse place. It needs big, brave decisions for people to go, actually, let’s just stop and let’s just break this thing apart. Make it simpler. No, not start again, but just start driving value out of the SaaS products, which invariably have AI plugged into them and drive it that way.

I don’t think we’ve got time to do that. Like I said, it’s like moving a relentless place. Does anyone have time now to do a two year transformation project or a one year transformation project? Do ever those do ev Do they ever get finished? I don’t know. Chris, I don’t blame you for not doing a CIO job at all.

They’re bloody hard and you’ve gotta drive influence and, and all that kind of, it’s just that hard, right? And the reality is, is who everyone’s gonna blame. They’re gonna blame the it, right? Because that’s what we all do.

Nick: That’s a really, I give Chris a chance to think some, that’s a, that’s a really good point about from on-prem to SaaS generally and how that has arguably been mismanaged from my own point of view in the.

People have like taken on-prem and just picked it up and put it down in a data center or someone else’s data center or a bunch of virtual services. When, to me, looking at that from a relatively technical point of view was always, oh, there’s, there’s a whole new set of things you can do. There’s a whole set of limits that don’t apply anymore.

IE. You know, just, just the obvious physical limits aren’t there anymore with regard to networking and compute and whatever. But so many organizations didn’t take that opportunity. So if you do that, but now add LLMs, which are going to be doing the same, are gonna be sort of slotted into the same bad processes thinking they’ll it just, it just sounds I’m far less optimistic.

Now than I was sort of half an hour ago in this conversation. I’m so sorry, Nick. No, no, but no, but it also, what was, what I wanted to sort of jump in and ask was, do you think this is an opportunity for organizations who are brave enough to make those kind of choices? Because it feels like a lot of organizations will fail.

Sort of slowly, but they’ll fail because they’ll keep doing the same kind of standard approach of piecemeal long-term transformations that don’t work. I,

Rebecca: I think, I think two, I think two things here, right? First of all, do I think they’ll fail fairly? I, I think two org some organizations wrote fail. I just throw cash.

You do. Although just. Type things off, or they’ll just, they’ll opt, they’ll have to optimize. Right? That’s what will, that’s what will happen. But it, I mean, they’re not properly driving Chris’s favorite ebitda, right? They’ll be, they’ll be missing a, they’ll be missing a trick. They won’t be doing strategic, they’ll be doing tactical stuff.

I think there’s a real opportunity here for, for smaller organizations that are more agile, that haven’t created this spaghetti mess of stuff to, to really shine. I think IA ai, ia AI get, we get two letters in the right way around. What am I doing? I, I, I think AI will be a real opportunity because it’s.

It’s a way for people to get that intelligence on tap. Right? By the way, I think Microsoft coined that phrase, but I’m gonna steal it from the right. That intelligence on tap, you know, into an organization that really wasn’t possible for organizations of a smaller scale than some of the larger ones, right?

So I think that’s really gonna be a, a thing that’s smaller organizations can leverage more than larger organizations, but. I, I, I do think it’s, it’s gonna be a real problem unless you pair back and simplify your processes. AI is just gonna make them more complicated and you’re just kicking that can down the road, which all of us on this podcast have seen many, many times before, right?

People not making the right decisions in time, A, because of cost, B, because of impact, or, or c, because of whatever it is. But it is about being bold and brave. And if you’re not being bold and brave with how you tackle, how to implement ai. Then I do think you’re just storing up problems for the future.

And maybe that’s why people don’t stay in their jobs for 15 years anymore, Chris. ’cause they just don’t, don’t wanna leave the mess. And that’s what interims have to come in and clear it up or at least kind of put a, a, a, you know, polish your head on it. Maybe. I don’t know. I was

Chris: I was talking to somebody about this the other day actually, and they were talking to me about, you know, oh, you know, is, it is really gonna turn, you know, businesses upside down so that you know, the, the business that you are in now will work completely differently because of ai.

And I’m, and, and my take on it is, well, maybe but unlikely because actually the people, there’s too many people with a vested interest in it staying the way it is, more or less, you know, it’s paying their pensions. It’s, you know, they, they, they’ve got a team of people under them, which means that they have to get paid a certain salary to stay at the top of that particular pyramid.

And if you end up with turning upside down because of ai.

That all goes away. Right? So the, so the a, the, the vested interests in, in large companies means that they will probably stay the same. And as you say, it will be the smaller companies, it will be the younger companies and the, and the businesses that, that step in to the gap with the failed businesses have been.

That, you know, will be an evolution that way and, and therefore it won’t be in the next five years, it’ll be in the next 15 years, 20 years probably.

Rebecca: And, and there’ll be something else other than AI that we’ll be talking about, right? Whether there be, there’ll be another technology that we, you know, may maybe general ai general artificial intelligence would’ve, would’ve, would’ve emerged then.

And generally, maybe they can be our colleagues at that point, right? And to be fair, maybe it can thick all the problems that the humans of course, right now, right. Maybe I’ll tell you what I do think will be an interesting technology, and, and if I, if I think back about a technology and I think about. You know, can I, can I name softwares?

Like sa Well I’ve now named Salesforce Dynamics, all those tools, right? I think they’re in a really tricky place right now, right? Because they’re very structured bits of, of software, right? They, they do some error, a function. And what’s great about them at the moment, which you can lift upon it, we can see what they do.

We can see the logic in them. Just like when you write code, you can see the logic or somebody can some software engineer can tell the logic. What I’d love to see happen with AI is if AI. Just replaces all those applications, all the application layer, and has a very dynamic way of building and creating stuff.

So actually maybe Nick can divide coding with six lines of code about how to, how to do some amazing p and l in finance, or how to do some amazing marketing thing or, or some sales activity. But you just. Stick AI on a load of data, but the AI also produces a business logic. Now, just imagine how amazing that would be when you want then wanna do a, a business transformation.

You don’t have to go through all those cycles of actually, you know, doing the code testing, the code. AI would just handle that for you. And that blows my mind. But I also know thinking about vested interest is, what does that mean for those players like Microsoft, like Salesforce, you know, like all the others.

That have built that logic into that code, when actually, if you’re just building ai, just letting AI do that, I think that’d be really interesting. And I’d like to see the first AI ERP or the AI CRM, that’s not actually an ERP or him, it’s just AI logic. Yeah, there’s an ai,

Chris: there’s a kind of Benedict Evans.

Evan, is that his name? Somebody he, he he does a, a thing every year about his predictions and, and last year he was talking about, or the start of this year talking about you’ve got these two camps really. You’ve got your, you’ve got your AI pragmatists and your ai maximalist and the pragmatist think that the AI is a component of an existing type of system.

Your ISTs think that the AI will become the system. Then you have components that, that, that the AI calls, but as you, to your point, Rebecca could write it could say, ah, now I need a thing to do that I’m gonna write the software, I’m gonna run it, and then I’m gonna start, and then I might delete it. Right?

Or I might keep it for next time, because I think it’s important that we have a consistent process there. But there’s a, there are, there are definitely two schools of thought and where, where that’s going.

Rebecca: If we, if we had the AI as being the, the, the, the systems architect, this is getting a bit kind of sky fi now.

Right. But that was the thing. And I, and I do think we’ll get there, def I definitely think we’ll get there. I’m sure people are developing this stuff, but it, it’s just like, you know, as a small business. Right. And I’m restarting my, my, my consultancy. But the reality is I’m the brain of that. But in reality, you know, I, I do the CRM, do the EIP, do the finance.

I guess they use my tools to do it, but actually as it grows, maybe I could just replace me with an AI that does all that stuff and because it would be much faster and probably much more, I’d be much more intelligent than I am. It could just do it much more faster, much more dynamically. Wouldn’t that be great?

Nick: Ish

Rebecca: on Nick. Great. Ish.

Nick: Ish. That wa as in I’m, I’m struck by your in to, to an, to answer what seems to be a relatively throwaway point. Far too seriously. I’m struck by your insight and experience, but that whole idea of you tell something that interprets what you want, then that thing goes and deals with the tools.

To me. Yeah, it sounds, I, I dunno if it’s possible, but to me that sounds ideal. And, you know, the whole point of all, all of this to turn ideas into things, to turn ideas into actions. Going back to your point about sort of leadership, that’s what leaders do is get people to turn their desires at work, to turn that into products or services or helping customers or whatever.

Being able to do that, that efficiently. Sounds so enticing, but I’m really, I’m really not sure if it’s possible. The technology seems so. Potentially disastrous at the moment. I mean, it’s, it’s all, it’s all, it’s all really exciting, but the, the sort of cone of possibilities is so wide right now. Well, for what,

Rebecca: how this

Nick: all

Rebecca: might turn out in 2025.

Right. I mean, the enticing sounds really good. Right. Let’s be really clear. Like the world around us is burning, so, and it genuinely does feel like, yeah, you look, you know, just, I, I do not wanna open the newspaper in the morning to to hear what someone else has said or what other. Disasters happen, natural disaster, poly related climate change, or what the disaster human created has happened.

Right. And it, and it, you know, may, maybe we need a bit of hope. Right? Maybe we need a bit of positivity to, to look forward to right now.

Chris: Yeah. And it depends, it depends on which side of the fence you stand, whether, whether the AI Maximus view is hope or it’s or it’s the other one. But but no, it’s, it, it is fascinating, right?

And, and this is our, I’ll tell you what, this is a really interesting subject and we could talk, talk about it for another hour. No doubt. We probably need to just cap it. But what I would like to hear just before we finish Rebecca, is because you are. You are exiting your current position. You, you know, you, you, you’ve taken some time and you’re gonna do something else.

You are starting up your own consultancy or restarting it.

Rebecca: I, I’m restarting, I’m reigniting lenika as, as I would describe it. So it’s, it’s the business I, I started when I did my interim work. I never, I never shut it down. I. I guess I’ve got COVID to, to end, you know, to say I had a couple of people running through it before COVID.

Obviously COVID didn’t happen there and that’s probably why I took the perm job at NC. Not just ’cause it was an amazing organization too, but I just thought, you know, keep the risk down. And then there was a time more recently to be bold and brave, right? And it’s just like, now’s that time. So yeah, that’s that’s exactly what I’m doing.

Somebody may come along and offer an amazing perm job. Possibly not after this podcast though, Chris and Nick, but you know, you’ll never know. But for now. Full steam ahead, focus on mea and we’ll see where that takes it. Right. You know, I’d possibly love to do some interim work as, as well, or certainly some fractional work.

That’s certainly the, the place I’d like to be. And that was certainly talked about on, on previous podcasts, but, you know, it’ll be a mix and match, you know, and as I, as I enter the twilight decade of my career yeah, I’m, I’m quite looking forward to seeing what that looks like. You, I, I certainly. I do not worry about my future.

Do you worry about the future of the human race? Yeah, probably. Right? You know, Arnold Schwartz think is just around the corner with, with his Terminator Act, possibly. I don’t know.

Speaker 2: Well, thank you for that

Chris: Rebecca. Another fascinating conversation and really one that I’ll be thinking about for some, quite some time respect. What we. Need to move on and we need to wrap up this episode of WB 40. And how do we do that? We always do it by talking about what we’re getting up to. So Nick, what’s your week look like?

Nick: Ah the, the less exciting thing is basically I’ve was scribbling down there. Oh, thanks. It’s like some admin rubbish is basically what I’ve written. Some sort of accountant related stuff. But the other thing is, what I might have mentioned on here before is. A what I might start calling an ongoing dynamic exercise or an o an ODE, which is basically a serious game.

Played over a series of turns of indeterminate length rather than you get everybody together for the same day. Everybody’s in the same room. Thinking about a thing is how to do that online, how to do that remotely, how to do that asynchronously. There’s an idea. I’ve been home for an age that I’m finally, I finally got some time to work on.

For the rest, the rest of the week, so that’s fine. Br

Chris: that’s al. Thank look.

Rebecca: Well tomorrow I am, I’m joining Haley again to do a talk at Manchester Manchester Festivals Women in Technology Day. We’re gonna be talking about breaking down the fortress to get into tech on Wednesday am Downey London on a panel for ice, which is the International Cyber Expo. And then on Thursday, it honestly, it’s a packed week.

I mean, Leeds, it’s like the amount of miles I’ve be clocking up around the uk. On a panel as part of Manchester, not Manchester Le Digital Festival. I’m on a panel talking about m and a and tech due diligence, which don’t quite that right before. And then maybe Friday, I’ll congratulations. I think that’s, that’s a fine

Chris: way to end the week.

So I this, this week actually is quite a bit like you, I’m trolling around, but. I think I’m, I’m in London for the next two days or maybe even three days. We’re going to an event tomorrow with a company called sibo who like a, they, they’re a bit of a sort of hosting type type company. And they’re really interesting, quite like those guys.

So I’ve got an event tomorrow there and then and, and then yeah, we’re doing events and insurance assured, so in Nash Tech. So we’re doing an InsureTech event in London on. Wednesday morning with a whole bunch of people from the InsureTech UK community about agent ai. And we’ve been running, we’ve been running sessions the last few weeks on that.

And we’ve got a whole bunch of people coming to that where we, where we’re gonna drill in some use cases and some of the regulatory issues with one of our legal partners. And one of our guys, Thomas, is gonna talk a bit more about the, you know, the real sort of rubber hitting in the road issues around it.

So, and particularly in insurance. ’cause of course, yeah, we talk about regulated industry. How do you make sure that you you know, you do this in the right way. So that’s, that’s gonna be really interesting. So yeah, by end this week I’ll be, I end at the end of the week. I’m going to Wales walking in, in the hills for a, for a couple of days.

So on Friday afternoon I should be off. So yeah, that’s my week as I, I look forward and it sounds like everybody’s got a week to look forward to. I’m you know, it’s in, in, they are different ways. I was just reflecting though, Rebecca, you’re talking about, you’re doing the. Manchester Women in tech and the digital leads Digital.

And you here are on podcast talking to two old white guys, you know, with various of beard.

Rebecca: That’s, that’s okay.

Speaker 2: Listen,

Rebecca: that diversity is about diversity, right. You know, everybody’s part of the diversity mix, right? Whether it’s two white gentlemen or whether it’s swimming or whether it’s people of color, whether it’s LGBT people, whatever, right? Diversity’s diversity. You need a bit of everyone Yeah, indeed.

To make that diverse. Okay. Well thank you very much Rebecca. It’s

Chris: been absolutely fascinating. And thank you to my co-host Nick. Once more, and thank you to you dear listener out there in podcast Land Listening because it’s, it wouldn’t be the same without you. See you next time.

Speaker 2: Fantastic.

Rebecca: Thank you for listening to WB-40. You can find us on the [email protected] and all good podcasting platforms.

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