An IT leadership gap is rarely planned. An IT leader resigns with a month’s notice, an acquisition closes before anyone has decided who runs IT in the combined company, a transformation programme loses its sponsor halfway through, a client audit goes badly, and the findings land on a function with nobody to own them.
In each case the organisation needs the same thing, and needs it quickly : someone who can hold the role from the first week, make decisions that stand after they leave, and strengthen the function rather than simply keep it running.
Akility takes that role, whether it is titled Head of IT, IT Director, or CIO. Interim, fractional, or long-term, the mandate is executive, with full accountability for the IT function, its people, its budget, its suppliers, and its compliance posture.
The IT function : structure, roles, sourcing model, service delivery, and the capabilities the organisation needs rather than the ones it happens to have.
Strategy and roadmap : a technology direction tied to business priorities, costed, sequenced, and defensible in front of an executive committee or a board.
Suppliers and contracts : selection, negotiation, and ongoing accountability for managed service providers, cloud providers, and enterprise agreements.
Compliance and security posture : IT policies, GxP obligations, and the cybersecurity standard the organisation has to meet.
Akility has held IT leadership roles in companies at very different stages : a listed clinical-stage company that had grown into manufacturing and quality control without an IT department, a contract manufacturer running several sites across two countries with two IT estates to merge after an acquisition, and a global commercial-stage biotech that needed its infrastructure and cybersecurity leadership covered without a pause.
The work has run from building an IT function out of nothing (governance, support, security, operations, and the team) through merging infrastructures and delivering qualified environments for new GxP manufacturing and quality control facilities, to restructuring an established global service delivery model, renegotiating provider contracts, and aligning IT policies with NIS2 and ISO 27001. Some mandates carried accountability for computerised system validation and data integrity. Others carried a reporting line to the CIO, a seat on the IT management team, a global network redesign, and the managed service provider.
What they have in common is how they ended. The IT departments created are still running. The merged organisation still covers every site. Costs came down, service levels rose, and security postures became auditable, under the leadership recruited to take the function forward.
It starts quickly. No onboarding programme, no ramp-up plan, and no learning curve on the sector. Decisions start in the first week because the situations are familiar ones.
The person who discusses the work is the person who does it. No account manager, and no handover to a delivery team.
Three engagement models. Interim, for a role that must be held continuously until it is permanently filled. Fractional, for an organisation that needs executive IT leadership without a full time appointment. Long-term, where the mandate runs for the duration of a transformation.
It is built to end. A mandate succeeds when the organisation no longer needs it : when the structure, the processes, the team, and the supplier relationships all stand without the person who put them in place.
Akility takes the IT leadership role. It does not provide technical staff, operate systems, or act as a recruitment intermediary. Where specialist delivery is needed, Akility defines the requirement, selects the provider, and holds it accountable, which is the leadership task, not a substitute for it.