Brightwater Executive’s Anne-Marie Walsh: Senior IT leaders need to be as diverse as ever in their skills

Anne-Marie Walsh, Partner, Brightwater Executive

Anne-Marie Walsh, Partner at Brightwater Executive, spoke to Business & Finance about the challenges facing IT leaders and the growing demand for senior IT people.

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Brightwater Executive is a branch of the Brightwater Group, focusing on executive and senior-management assignments. Brightwater is a recruitment consultancy firm, as opposed to ‘agency’. Anne-Marie Walsh speaks of the high demand for senior IT leaders and what companies have to do to retain these workers in the current economic climate alongside the challenges they may face.

“I think the biggest change in senior IT leadership roles in recent times has been the move from a very strong technical, lights-on-type profile, to now a much more diverse, Renaissance person”, said Walsh.

She continued: “Now a CTO will have to look at everything, from very strong vendor management, client-relationship management; look into data, look into cloud, look into security. Really if you look at all those different mixes, you need quite a broad profile as well as somebody who is very commercially strong.”

From this, Walsh discussed the challenges now facing these leaders.

“I think the key challenges for senior tech leaders today is, firstly, staff retention, particularly of maybe younger staff workforce coming is one key thing.

“And then a second thing I think is sometimes for CTOs, for senior leaders, is it can be quite lonely at the top of an organisation, and that’s the challenge of how do they go and support themselves externally – maybe through networking or looking to external consultancies in terms of strategic advice and support.”