The cacophonous hype surrounding emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing, shows no signs of abating. However, away from the vendor booths at DTX 2025 at the ExCel Centre in London, where technology salespeople were attempting to sell their latest and greatest AI-enabled products, digital leaders were taking to the stage to focus on an important underlying truth: that, in the tech industry, success is a team sport.
Take Richard Corbridge, CIO at Segro, who reflected on the event with Tech Monitor, suggesting the presentations on the main stage reaffirmed the sense that effective digital transformation is as much a human activity as it is a technological process. To foster the right results, IT professionals and their line-of-business peers must collaborate closely on clear organizational objectives.
“We’ve got to remember what we were aiming for,” he said. “We’ve been talking about collaboration for 25 years, and a lot of the same things are still coming around. However, it feels like we’re now in a place where that focus on outcomes is starting to make a difference.”
This point was hammered home by Ade Bamigboye, chief technology officer at the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, who said in a session on the event’s main stage that digital leaders who implement new technologies must consider culture, workforce planning, and skills development.
In fact, as Corbridge implied, those elements are often more important than the technological factors. To this point, Bamigboye offered the audience an important takeaway: “If we want to achieve productivity goals through innovation, we must make our cultural legacy as visible and as trackable as a technology debt.”
Supporting each other
The overarching focus on cultural considerations was returned to during later sessions. In a panel on ‘Breaking silos: Aligning tech leadership for strategic impact’, five digital leaders discussed the importance of cross-functional collaboration for aligning IT strategy with core business objectives, driving innovation, and achieving organisational success.
Echoing Bamigboye’s earlier comments, Amit Thawani, CIO for insurance, pensions, and investments at Lloyds Banking Group, suggested effective cross-functional collaboration is about establishing the right culture. Traditionally, the IT organisation and other business units operated in silos. Today, successful business and digital teams work together to define joint outcomes with clear KPIs. “Collaboration is about having each other’s backs,” he said.
That sentiment chimed with Peter Nota, CISO at Vanquis Banking Group, who said successful collaboration is about defining a clear outcome. He added that effective security policies often boil down to one simple strategy: “What do I see and what am I doing about it?” Nota’s team has worked with peers across the business to establish a target operating model, required tooling, and a transformation that involves replacing legacy kit with cloud services.
Charlotte Bemand, director of digital futures at Hottinger Brüel & Kjær, was another executive who recognized the criticality of cross-functional collaboration. Her team has worked with its cross-functional colleagues over the past six months to put digital, data, and AI at the heart of the firm’s business strategy. “Those words are now on every single page, almost every other paragraph, of the strategy,” she said. “That approach means we’ve got buy-in for digital change from our colleagues. We’ve established it’s not ‘you’ and ‘us’ anymore.”
However, cross-functional collaboration, although preferable, isn’t always essential. Nick Creagh, an experienced higher education chief data officer, said that while great products often require strong relationships across groups, it sometimes makes sense to exclude people because silos can be important for delivering innovation safely: “In one of the universities, I’m working with AI researchers, and if we let them operate on the main networks, then there’s a very real risk that some of the things they’re doing could blow up in our faces.”
The conclusion from panellists was that innovation must be set within the context of prevailing rules and regulations. Shruti Sharma, chief data and AI officer at Save the Children UK, said governance often comes with a bad reputation and is associated with bureaucracy and administration. Sharma takes a different tack. Her organisation establishes data security and data governance foundations and then steps back carefully, giving people the room to explore safely. “What we’ve done is allow people to experiment in sandbox environments, but they also have clarity around boundaries and definitions,” she said.
Bringing people with you
The importance of cultural change also loomed large in a later panel session on ‘Building change around people, not just process.’ In this session, three digital leaders discussed how IT professionals can win hearts and minds during transformation journeys.
Segro’s Richard Corbridge said buy-in requires a strong connection with business peers, which isn’t necessarily easy. Smart digital leaders ensure the benefits of technology are articulated in terms that non-IT people understand. “There is a bit of a ‘shiny things syndrome’ right now with the rise of AI,” Corbridge argued. “Success is about how you put people at the centre of what you’re doing to then take them on that journey with you.”
The good news, suggested Renzo Procaccini, CIO at Assured Partners International, is that fear and resistance to change are a normal signal that shows people have concerns that should be listened to carefully. “Take the time to go and engage and find out what’s going on,” he said. “When initiatives fail, it’s normally because people haven’t paid enough attention to the worries that people have on the ground.”
Robert Maughan, deputy CISO at UCL, also said that winning hearts and minds is about keeping an open ear to business colleagues. He searches for solutions to their challenges by discovering what change means to them: “If I can’t answer that question, then I shouldn’t be pitching a change to them, because if I’m not making their life easier simpler, or getting rid of something that they don’t want to do, they just aren’t going to be interested in doing it because they’ve all got a day job to do that isn’t my change program.”
DTX London 2025 was held at the ExCel Centre, London, from 1 to 2 October 2025.
