ChrisTech

Christina van Spaendonck has run the business and the systems behind it. As former executive of a 200 year old Dutch men's shoes brand, she carried both the commercial strategy and the technology that was meant to deliver it. This is where she learned that most technology investments fail for reasons that have nothing to do with technology.

That insight is the basis for ChrisTech. She works with executives on business information management and digital transformation, starting from the premise that return on investment is decided by leadership, team design and data literacy long before any system goes live. The software is rarely the problem; the organisation around it usually is.

Her range is unusually wide for the field. She reads company architecture at the level of an executive and rebuilds ICT at the level of an engineer - including the legacy systems and undocumented datasets most consultants route around. She designs and reconciles ERP data architectures, builds operational and financial reporting environments and programs when the analysis demands more than a dashboard can give. She is literate in most innovations in the artificial intelligence field.

What executives tend to value is the translation. Christina can sit in a board discussion and a data pipeline team meeting on the same day, and move an organization between the two without information getting lost. The strategy is technically literate; the technical work is commercially aware.

She is rigorous to a fault - more interested in finding the weak joint in an a model than in agreeing with the room. The result is advice that holds up after she leaves.