Technology. Leadership. Experience. Perspective.
Devendra Kumar
Technology leader. Transformation practitioner. Lifelong student.
30+ years across technology, global delivery, digital transformation, cloud, AI and automation.
This is where I share what I've learned, what I believe and what I'm still learning.
My Perspective
Three threads run through everything I write.
Field Notes
What I'm writing about at the moment.
Working themes rather than finished pieces. Essays will appear here as they're written.
Your transformation dashboard is probably lying to you.
The problem wasn't the technology.
What 1,200 application migrations taught me about complexity.
Why good architecture still produces bad outcomes.
The difference between automation and operational improvement.
Technology
The decisions I keep returning to.
AI
Where it genuinely changes the economics of work, and where it is being asked to carry weight it cannot hold.
Agentic AI
Autonomy, boundaries and accountability — what has to be true before an agent is allowed near a real process.
Cloud
Landing zones, cost discipline and the long tail of workloads nobody wants to touch.
Automation
The difference between removing effort and removing the reason the effort existed.
Enterprise architecture
Architecture as a decision record, not a diagram — and how it earns its authority.
Infrastructure
Resilience, migration sequencing and the unglamorous work that decides whether anything else lands.
Data
Ownership, lineage and the quiet reasons reporting disagrees with itself.
Emerging technology
How I read a new capability: what problem it retires, what cost it introduces, what it assumes about your organisation.
Leadership
What leadership looks like when the plan meets the organisation.
CDO leadership
What the role actually holds — mandate, budget, sequencing and the politics of a shared agenda.
Technology leadership
Setting direction with incomplete information, and being clear about which bets you are making.
Executive decision-making
How decisions get made under pressure, and how to leave a trail your successor can read.
Governance
Forums that surface reality early rather than confirm the plan late.
Teams
Hiring, trust, succession and the conditions under which good engineers do their best work.
Global delivery
Time zones, handovers and the cultural translation that no operating model diagram captures.
Career lessons
Thirty years of choices — the ones that compounded and the ones I would make differently.
Managing complexity
Reducing it where possible, absorbing it where necessary, and naming it honestly either way.
My Journey
Six stages, one continuous education.
- Stage 01
Engineering
Close to the machine — writing, breaking and supporting systems. Where I learned that most outages are explained by something ordinary.
- Stage 02
Technology leadership
First responsibility for other people's work: estimates, standards, and the discovery that clarity is a leadership deliverable.
- Stage 03
Global delivery
Programs spanning geographies and vendors. Delivery became as much about handovers and language as about engineering.
- Stage 04
Digital transformation
Modernisation at scale — migrations, platforms, operating models, and the organisational absorption that decides the outcome.
- Stage 05
Executive technology leadership
Portfolio-level choices: what to fund, what to stop, and how to keep a multi-year agenda intact through change.
- Stage 06
CDO perspective
Sitting where technology, operations and the business case meet — and translating between them without losing precision.
Speaking
Selected Speaking & Conversations
Talks, panels, interviews and conversations will appear here.
Speaking →My consulting work is presented separately through DK Transformation.