I am the kind of technology leader this blueprint identifies as missing from DHCW’s executive team. I know this because I was there — serving as DHCW’s Chief DevOps Officer, later renamed Chief Product and Technology Officer, before leaving to build the structural analysis no internal review could produce.
The profile
I am Dr Rafal Bergman — PhD and MSc Computer Science, PMP, Oxford Saïd Executive Leadership Programme. Twenty-five years building and delivering complex technology systems at scale, with more than £400M in technology products and platforms shipped globally; four technology companies founded and exited; engineering leadership at IBM; national-scale systems delivered for governments, defence ministries, and Fortune 500 enterprises across more than thirty countries. A deep technologist as much as a leader: three granted patents, published research in real-time data systems and AI, and hands-on AI engineering expertise at production scale.
SRT Marine Systems (Chief Technology Officer). Invented, designed, and built the first version of a national-scale real-time analytics and predictive-intelligence platform; led a team of fifty-plus engineers to productionise it. Deployed across more than thirty countries — including national programmes in Bahrain (where it won the King’s National Project of the Year Award), Kuwait, Canada, Korea, Norway, Australia, Ecuador, and Azerbaijan. Underlying architecture patented in the US, UK, and EU.
Improbable (Software Engineering Manager, Defence). Built and led high-performance computing teams delivering platforms for the Ministry of Defence, the Royal Navy, and NATO — including the foundational platform for NATO’s £10B Collective Training Transformation Programme.
Reed Smith LLP (High Court Expert Witness). In a Hong Kong criminal case involving thirty-nine casualties, built bespoke software to analyse raw radar and AIS data, reconstructed events that a two-year Commission of Inquiry had missed, gave six days of testimony under cross-examination, and helped vindicate an innocent captain. Forensic reconstruction against an institutional narrative that had already hardened.
IBM (Software R&D Manager). Architected and delivered the Digital Public Services Platform (ePUAP) for the Polish Government, alongside large-scale systems for ING Bank and other financial institutions.
AdBrain AI (Co-Founder, exit). Built an agentic AI platform that resolved 67% of customer cases without human intervention at one of Europe’s largest insurance brokerages.
GeoVS Limited (Founder, exit). Commercialised my PhD research into a global data, logistics, and security platform used by BP, Statoil, the Port of Milford Haven, and the Panama Canal. Exited via sale to SRT Marine Systems.
This is the background the diagnosis on this site says DHCW’s executive needed and did not have. The structural gap is documented at L7: The Competence Void.
Why I joined DHCW
I joined DHCW as Chief DevOps Officer in February 2024 — a role later renamed Chief Product and Technology Officer. DHCW sits at the heart of digital delivery across NHS Wales. Every patient referral, every clinical system, every piece of health-data infrastructure flows through it — 3.16 million people, over 611,000 currently on waiting lists. The organisation was struggling, and I knew from experience that technology transformation in complex public institutions is among the hardest work there is. I closed my consulting practice and accepted the role at a substantial pay cut.
This was not a career move. It was a decision to serve — at a significant personal cost.
Alongside my role at DHCW, I served as Technical Lead of the Welsh Government Commission for AI in Health and Social Care, where I authored the national AI adoption and technical innovation strategy for the Welsh NHS. As far as I know, that strategy was never implemented — in my view, for want of the foresight and skills to act on it at Welsh Government and within DHCW leadership.
What I built in fifteen months
- Within two months: identified and stopped over £1M of wastage, and identified a detrimental contract change made by the vendor. This gave me pause — it should not have been possible in a well-managed organisation.
- Within six months: started programmes to save a further £5M and remediate the most broken and dangerous parts of the digital portfolio — including the systems responsible for all integrations and the flow of patient referrals across Wales.
- Proposed re-procurement and buy-versus-build changes that would prevent £20-30M per year of recurring wastage, and give DHCW engineers the opportunity to grow in skills and confidence.
- Led the transformation of a 300-strong technical organisation responsible for the strategic portfolio of national products underpinning healthcare delivery in Wales.
- Established a software-engineering culture grounded in TOGAF, agile, domain-driven design, test-driven development, CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, platform engineering, observability, FinOps, and DevSecOps.
- Proposed new principles for product management — focused on compounding value to the NHS and patients, and on breaking the vendor dependence that drives constant, wasteful re-procurement exercises — to the Technical Decisions Authority.
Almost none of these reforms survived after my departure.
Every programme I built to save money, fix dangerous systems, or improve delivery capability was discontinued, defunded, or transferred to areas without the structural conditions to sustain it. The pattern was systematic, not incidental.
The institutional resistance is the same mechanism the analysis documents at L9: Whistleblower Suppression and L10: The Information Fortress — the structural conditions that operate when psychological safety is absent. The next page explains why.