Twenty-five years in regulated public service, most of it spent making technical decisions stand up to governance scrutiny. NHS Digital, NHS England, social housing. National data infrastructure used by tens of millions of citizens, clinical standards adopted across the system, products built to the regulatory bar set by the Information Commissioner, the Care Quality Commission, and the Regulator of Social Housing.
I bring three things to a board.
The first is sector fluency in regulated public service. I understand how the NHS commissions, how housing associations are held to account under the Consumer Standards, and how public-sector procurement frameworks shape the choices an organisation has. I know what good governance looks like in these settings because I’ve built the artefacts that support it: data protection impact assessments, architecture decision records, benefits realisation frameworks, audit trails that hold up under regulatory inspection.
The second is the technical reading of risk. Most boards are strong on finance, competent on legal, and structurally lighter on the engineering reality of the decisions they sign off. I read architecture diagrams as governance documents. “We’ll fix it in the next sprint” reads to me as a risk register entry nobody has logged. A vendor’s elegant integration story reads to me as a set of assumptions about data the organisation holds, and those assumptions are testable. Translating that to a chair or an audit committee, without condescension and without the engineer’s reflex to perform expertise, is most of the job.
The third is independent challenge, used in service of the board rather than against it. The pattern I see most often is a room aligned around a direction built on a model of how the technology works that nobody has tested out loud. The right question at the right moment is rarely about the answer. It’s about whether the room understands what it has decided. Asked well, the question lifts the quality of the decision and the confidence of the executive carrying it forward. Asked badly, it slows the room and irritates the chair. I work hard to ask it well.
Alongside the boardroom work, I sit on the Patient Participation Group at Chevin Medical Practice. It keeps me close to how national systems land at the point of use, which is where the gap between policy and reality tends to show up first.
The boards I’m interested in operate in regulated sectors. Social housing, the NHS, and the parts of public service where a technical decision and a governance decision are usually the same decision. I’m most useful where the organisation has a serious technology agenda, a meaningful regulatory perimeter, and a chair who wants the technical reading of risk in the room.
For board enquiries: richard.sutcliffe@gmail.com.