BHF's CTO left at the peak of transformation - here’s why that’s a good thing

Three years, two transformations, one exit

Alex Duncan left the British Heart Foundation just as its transformation peaked. Here she tells us why she did it, where she’s going next, and how she made sure the change programme wouldn’t stall without her at the helm.

At a certain point in their career, many IT professionals find a growing desire to give back: to join an organisation with purpose. Thus the slow trickle of experienced C-level leaders from the private sector to charities and NGOs, where the hours are long, budgets are short, and the reward is great.

The promise of a mission is what drew Alex Duncan from her past leadership roles at companies including QVC, Bionic and Costa Coffee to join the British Heart Foundation as its CTO – and now, what is bringing her back to the private sector.

“My roots lie in the commercial sector, so I always knew I would [be back],” she says. “BHF was a special opportunity, because of the mission and how it resonates with me personally.”

However, after three and a half years implementing a largescale digital transformation and futureproofing the charity’s IT estate, Alex says this was “the right time” to leave. She joined media and entertainment company Global as CTO in September – a return to her roots for someone who got her start in technology running an internet radio station.

“What I always look for in every role is a combination of ‘what can I bring in terms of my experience?’, and then secondly, ‘what can I learn?’

“Global's a really interesting company because you've got the audio side, and then you've got the advertising side. And I know very little about advertising technology, so that's the area I can learn in.”

CTO exits, systems stay standing

IT is all about transformation, but too often a lack of succession planning means the large, complex projects needed to drive change fade into memory when their main sponsor leaves the business.

After working on the same programme for three years, Alex wasn’t going to let that happen.

“There's still lots of work to do, we're in build at the moment, but there's no reason why it can't and won't stay on track and to budget, because in partnership with other organisations we've built a really strong programme structure around it.”

It wasn’t always like that, though; Alex believes that if she’d left just 12 months before, the programme could have stalled.

“This time last year we were trying to make sure we had the right people in place and so on. Now it's much greater than the sum of its parts. The scaffolding, the infrastructure, the governance around the programme is all in.

“Every part of the programme has now been approved by the trustees, so it's all been greenlit, whereas this time last year I think we only had one workstream approved or about to be approved.”

Embedding the programme’s benefits into BHF’s ambitious growth plan, and thus into the organisation as a whole, was key to its success. The charity is targeting 30% income growth in the next three-to-five years, which relies on a modern IT estate. Retail, finance, HR, CRM, marketing – everything is in line for an upgrade. That’s step one in the programme’s goals:

“The three main goals are: one, to remove legacy systems before they become out of out of support; two, to modernise our overall technology infrastructure and move it to the cloud; and three, to provide the foundations to drive growth.”

Future-proofing is about more than just setting goals, though; you need a plan for how to reach that end point. Alex made sure difficult questions were being asked – and, more importantly, answered. Questions about the future of the BHF tech team; how to prepare for a cloud-first world; and should the charity fully change its operating model?

The answer to the last question, at least, is “not yet.” The team has recently finished the build of a “really good” operating model, with a focus on the customer and dedicated sectors for different disciplines: project management, product management and so on.

“We've really started to see the benefits of that now in terms of how [staff] are working,” says Alex, “but also the pride that people have in terms of the chapter that they work in and what direction they want it to go.

“That's helped with retention as well as personal development."

BHF’s cyber “wasn’t going anywhere”

Complicating matters, BHF wasn’t running just one transformation programme, but two at once. The second was all about cyber, as the charity revamped its security posture to get accredited for Cyber Essentials Plus.

“That has taken three years,” Alex admits. “It was on the list of active projects when I joined, and to be honest, it wasn't going anywhere... It was a line item on a list of projects.”

There were several reasons it took so long to get the project moving, including the need to explain to leadership why it was necessary. But the big issue was that it was another largescale change programme, “and change is difficult” - especially when you’re trying to balance two such programmes at the same time.

Two areas presented a particular challenge. The first was vulnerability management and patching, which Alex explains was “really hard for us, because essentially it's a new capability that we've had to develop.” BHF is using a third party for help.

The second area was protecting the retail estate, “a really big potential attack surface” that has grown organically – with all that implies for security. Bringing in “the right processes and controls” across applications and people, many of them volunteers, was a challenge.

In the end, though, BHF achieved its accreditation before Alex left at the end of August: “a really big achievement for the technology and information security team, and the wider BHF as well.”

Reflecting on her time at the British Heart Foundation as she returns to the private sector, Alex says, “I've talked a lot about maturing the capability. I think that's definitely what we've done, but I suppose [I’m also proud of] setting an ambitious vision as well: the change that we've delivered and are delivering is really ambitious, not just for a charity but for other organisations.

“It's about pace, it's about ambition, it’s about delivery and it’s about maturation.”