The leadership series

Nothing has run yet, and this page will not pretend otherwise

There are no instalments below because none have been published. This page exists at this address because the address predates the current publication, and because the series is planned rather than because it has a history. When the first interview runs it will appear here with a date on it, and the list will grow one item at a time. Until then the honest description of the series is a set of commitments, which is what follows.

Why a series about leadership rather than about technology

The National Audit Office made the case better than a publication could. Its 2023 report on digital transformation observed that the technology community is expected to drive change on behalf of business leaders, while most digital change decisions are made by permanent secretaries, chief executives, chief operating officers and directors general: the people who set the funding, the scope and the procurement route. Those decisions succeed or fail on whether the person taking them understands what they are choosing between.

The same report put numbers to the gap. Around 200 non-specialist executives had received digital awareness training against a target of 6,500 set in the government's own roadmap. Roughly 4% of civil servants were digital professionals, against an industry average the report puts at between 8% and 12%. And 37% of government digital, data and technology recruitment campaigns were unsuccessful. Eleven cross-government digital strategies had been launched over the preceding 25 years, every one of them aiming at usability, efficiency and legacy systems.

Eleven attempts at the same three problems is not a technology story. It is a story about who decides, on what information, under what pressure, and with what understanding of the consequences. That is the subject.

The format this series commits to

Each instalment is a single named interviewee, in a named organisation, in a stated role, speaking on the record. Interviews run long, because the interesting material in a technology decision is usually the constraint the interviewee did not choose and cannot easily describe in a sentence. Quotes are checked with the interviewee for factual accuracy before publication. Framing, selection and headline are the publication's, and are not offered for approval.

Where an interviewee cites a figure, Foundry4 either finds the primary source and links it or prints the claim as the interviewee's account rather than as fact. That rule applies to everything on this site and it applies with more force in an interview, because a confident figure delivered in conversation is the easiest kind of error to repeat.

What it will not be

It will not be a vendor platform. Nobody appears in this series to describe a product they sell, and no instalment is paid for, sponsored or supplied.

It will not be a profile. There is no interest here in a leader's morning routine or their reading list. The questions are about the decision: what was on the table, what was ruled out and why, what the run cost turned out to be, and what they would refuse to sign a second time.

It will not use anonymous composites. An unnamed leader at an unnamed organisation is indistinguishable from an invention, and this publication does not print things a reader cannot check. If a subject can only speak unattributably, the material informs the reporting elsewhere rather than appearing here as an instalment.

What to read in the meantime

The arguments the series will put to its subjects are already running across the site. The recurring one is that the second-year run cost decides whether a programme survives, which is set out at length in the analysis of intelligent automation. The failure patterns that show up when a pilot meets a second department belong to digital transformation, and the procurement and accountability questions that shape most British technology decisions sit under public sector technology. How Foundry4 sources, checks and corrects what it publishes is set out in its editorial guidelines.