If you look at some of the technology leadership changes happening across Australia this year, there doesn’t seem to be an obvious pattern in terms of structure.
CBA has recently put both its Group CIO and Group CTO on the executive leadership team, giving one accountability for business-aligned technology strategy and delivery and the other responsibility for enterprise technology foundations, engineering, security and AI. At the other end of the spectrum, Unity Bank has removed the CIO role altogether following its merger with G&C Mutual Bank, with executive responsibility for technology now sitting with the COO. Qantas has moved from a traditional Group CIO structure to a combined Chief Technology, AI and Transformation Officer, while Coles has temporarily moved responsibility for technology under its Chief Operations and Supply Chain Officer following the departure of its CTO.
Different organisations and very different structures, but there is a common thread running through most of them. The boundaries around technology leadership are becoming increasingly difficult to define.
For a long time, the progression was relatively straightforward. A senior technology leader built their career through technology, eventually took responsibility for a large function and, at the top of that structure, sat the CIO or CTO. They were expected to understand the technology environment, keep it secure and resilient, manage significant budgets and teams, and deliver the technology agenda. None of that has gone away, but a lot has been added to it.
Technology now sits across almost every meaningful business priority. AI is changing products, customer interactions and internal processes. Data increasingly informs commercial decisions. Cyber is an enterprise risk and board issue. Large transformation programs cut across technology, operations and the business rather than sitting neatly within one function. At the same time, many organisations are rethinking their operating models, using more vendor and offshore capability and expecting their internal teams to become leaner.
The result is a technology leadership role that increasingly looks as much like an enterprise leadership position as a functional one.
Qantas is probably one of the clearest Australian examples. Its Chief Technology, AI and Transformation Officer now has accountability for IT and technology, AI strategy, data and analytics, as well as enterprise technology-driven transformation. What's particularly interesting is that the appointment came from an operational and business leadership background rather than the traditional CIO pathway.
Coles gives us another version of the same trend. Following the departure of its CTO in March, technology responsibilities moved on an interim basis to the Chief Operations and Supply Chain Officer - a remit that already includes store operations, manufacturing, supply chain and automation strategy. It's an interim arrangement rather than necessarily a permanent change in structure, but it's still a useful example of just how closely technology and operations now intersect in a large, technology-enabled retailer.
I don't think one model is necessarily more progressive than another. A technology-heavy bank operating at CBA's scale has very different requirements to a smaller organisation where combining technology and operations might make complete sense. A retailer with huge investments in supply-chain automation, AI, digital commerce and fulfilment will have different requirements again. The more interesting point is that businesses appear increasingly willing to design technology leadership around what they need to achieve, rather than automatically defaulting to the structures we've traditionally recognised.
That creates an interesting challenge when it comes to hiring.
When we take a senior technology brief, there are still plenty of requirements that you'd expect to see: technology strategy, cyber, architecture, transformation, vendor management and delivery. Increasingly though, the things that differentiate one leader from another sit outside the traditional technology skillset. Can this person influence a CEO and board? Do they understand how the organisation makes money? Can they lead change outside their own function? Can they challenge business decisions rather than simply respond to them? Can they simplify something complicated enough for the rest of the executive team to make a decision?
AI is only accelerating that shift. Technology leaders aren't simply being asked to implement AI platforms; they're increasingly involved in deciding where AI creates commercial value, how operating models need to change around it and how organisations manage the associated risk. At Coles, for example, AI is already being applied across customer personalisation, forecasting, store operations, rostering, supply chain optimisation and team productivity. That's a technology agenda, but it's equally an operations, customer and business-performance agenda.
This is where I think some leadership briefs haven't quite caught up.
It's very easy to start a CIO or CTO search by looking for somebody who has already held the title, in the same industry, at a similarly sized organisation, ideally having delivered the same transformation before. Those things can absolutely matter, particularly in highly regulated or technically complex environments, but they can also lead businesses towards the safest-looking CV rather than the person best equipped for what comes next.
If the role itself is becoming broader, perhaps our definition of relevant experience needs to become broader with it.
That doesn't mean technical credibility suddenly stops mattering. In fact, as organisations become more dependent on vendors, AI and increasingly complex technology ecosystems, having leaders capable of asking the right technical questions becomes even more important. But being the strongest technologist in the room doesn't automatically make someone the strongest technology executive.
The latter increasingly requires judgement, commercial thinking, influence and the ability to operate across organisational boundaries. They need to understand enough about technology to lead it properly, while spending much of their time talking about customers, risk, growth, productivity, people and business performance.
Perhaps that's why we're starting to see technology, transformation and operations overlap so much at executive level. Whether tomorrow's CIO starts to look more like a COO, or tomorrow's COO starts to look more like a technology leader, I'm not sure there's one answer. Looking at the different structures emerging across Australian businesses this year, there probably shouldn't be.
But there is a useful question for any organisation about to appoint its next technology leader: are you hiring against what the role has traditionally looked like, or against what you're actually going to need from that person over the next five years?
