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High-Performance Leaders Podcast

From Help Desk to CIO: Leading Real Tech Change With Barry Smith

Wednesday · 1 hr 8 min · Season 1 · Episode 2 · 53.6 MB
0:00-1:08:17

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In this episode, host James Plant sits down with Barry Smith, former Chief Information Officer at Skanska UK, to unpack his remarkable career journey from an IT help desk in the late 1990s to leading board-level technology change across major global firms. 

Having held senior leadership roles at WS Atkins, Foster + Partners, and Skanska UK, Barry brings a grounded, people-first perspective to digital transformation. He shares how mentorship shaped his career roadmap, why a rejection for lacking ERP experience ultimately led to him delivering multi-million pound ERP programmes, and what it truly takes to align complex systems with core business goals. 

This is a candid, highly practical conversation on translating complex tech into plain English, avoiding costly transformation pitfalls, navigating AI opportunities across back-office and front-office operations, and the power of creating trust-driven team cultures. 

Key Highlights

  • 06:42 – The Skanska Rejection & The ERP Irony: How being turned down for lacking ERP experience paved the way to delivering Skanska's largest transformation programmes. 
  • 26:00 – Speaking "Boardroom" English: Why technical jargon loses the room and how CIOs must act as translators to get multi-million pound sign-offs. 
  • 29:20 – Why Multi-Million Pound Tech Transformations Fail: The open-heart surgery of replacing core systems—and why failures are about people and data, not software. 
  • 43:40 – Practical AI Beyond the Hype: Moving past FOMO to deploy real productivity tools, process automation, and autonomous AI agents. 

New episodes of the High-Performance Leaders Podcast drop regularly, pulling back the curtain on how senior leaders build cultures of sustained capability in complex, fast-moving industries.

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Connect with the Guest

• Barry Smith on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/barry-smith-b2b31032/

Connect with the Host & Sinclair James

• James Plant on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-plant-sinclairjames

• Sinclair James Website: https://www.sinclairjames.co.uk/

Production Partnership

• Produced by Vertical Drop: https://vertical-drop.com/