Winning the speed vs cost trade-off: Boardroom decisions that matter

June 24, 2026

12:15-13:15

Vision stage

Composable IT & Ecosystems

Innovation

IT transformation

Chair: Arya Choudhury, Director, Engineering and AI, PWC

12:15-12:30
Presentation: Navigating the hidden costs of composability — integration, latency and data complexity

Understanding where composable architectures introduce new integration overhead, runtime dependencies, and operational cost
Managing latency and service-level risk as business workflows span distributed, multi-vendor components
Preventing data fragmentation and consistency issues from eroding AI, automation, and real-time decision-making
Establishing architectural and governance guardrails that keep composability scalable rather than brittle

12:30-12:45
Case study: Platform transformation is behaviour change: the operating model shifts that make composable architecture real

Decision rights and ownership boundaries that actually work (and the anti-patterns that recreate integration debt)
Incentives and metrics that drive composable delivery across product, engineering, and operations
Adoption playbooks that survive real delivery pressure: what to do next

Chris Cope, Telco Chief Architect, Kraken Technologies
Stephen Kermode, Enterprise Architect, TalkTalk

12:45-13:00
Balancing innovation, risk and ROI in IT – how do you meet in the middle?

What is the minimum acceptable timeframe for a modernization project to show a positive ROI before it loses executive support?
How do you prevent building AI pilots from draining the budget needed for the core architectural de-risking that actually drives long-term value?
Which specific KPIs do you use to bridge the gap between "technical debt reduction" for the CIO and "shorter time-to-revenue" for the CEO?
When a transformation project hits a mid-way bottleneck, how do you decide whether to "double down" on the original vision or pivot to a tactical, lower-risk ROI?