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 Technology Officer before leaving to build the structural analysis no internal review could produce.
The profile
I am Dr Rafal Bergman — PhD Computer Science, PMP, Oxford Saïd Executive Leadership Programme. I have spent twenty-five years building and delivering complex technology systems at scale. I have founded four technology companies and exited all four. I have led engineering at IBM. I have delivered national-scale systems for governments, defence ministries, and Fortune 500 enterprises across more than thirty countries.
The specifics matter, because the diagnosis on this site rests on them.
SRT Marine Systems (Chief Technology Officer, hands-on). I invented, designed, and built the first version of a national-scale real-time analytics and predictive-intelligence platform, then led a team of fifty-plus engineers to productionise it. The platform deployed across more than thirty countries — including national-scale programmes in the Kingdoms of Bahrain and Kuwait, Canada, Korea, Norway, Australia, Ecuador, and Azerbaijan — and grossed over four hundred million pounds in sales. The underlying architecture is patented in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union.
Improbable (Software Engineering Manager, Defence). I built and led high-performance computing teams delivering platforms for the Ministry of Defence, the Royal Navy, and NATO — including the foundational technology platform for NATO’s £10B Collective Training Transformation Programme.
Reed Smith LLP (High Court Expert Witness). In a criminal case in the High Court of Hong Kong involving thirty-nine casualties, I 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 who would otherwise have served a substantial jail sentence. This was forensic reconstruction against an institutional narrative that had already hardened.
IBM (Software R&D Manager, Warsaw). I 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 (Head of AI Engineering, Co-Founder). I co-founded AdBrain and built an agentic AI platform that resolved sixty-seven per cent of customer cases without human intervention at one of Europe’s largest insurance brokerages.
GeoVS Limited (Founder, exit). I founded GeoVS to commercialise my PhD research into a global data, logistics, and security platform used by BP, Statoil, the Port of Milford Haven, and the Panama Canal. I exited via sale to SRT Marine Systems.
I hold three patents, have published research in real-time data systems and AI for logistics, and have spent twenty-five years in hands-on engineering and engineering leadership. I name this not to impress but to anchor what follows.
This is the background the diagnosis on this site says DHCW’s executive needed and did not have.
Why I joined DHCW
I joined DHCW as Chief Technology Officer in February 2024. I understood the scale of the challenge before I accepted. 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. That is 3.16 million people. Over 611,000 of them are 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 took a significant pay cut to accept the role. I closed my consulting practice. I did this because I wanted to give the NHS mission my full commitment, not a fractional one.
This was not a career move. It was a decision to serve.
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.
What I built in fifteen months
Within my first two months I discovered and stopped wastage of over one million pounds. Within six months I had started programmes that would save a further five million and fix some of 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. I proposed changes to re-procurement and buy-versus-build decisions that would stop wastage of twenty to thirty million pounds per year. I transformed a 300-strong technical organisation responsible for the strategic portfolio of national products underpinning healthcare delivery in Wales. I 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. I proposed new principles for product management to the Technical Decisions Authority.
What I encountered nearly broke me. Crippling incompetence and institutional resistance at every step, making change virtually impossible.
Almost none of my reforms survived after my departure.
Every programme I built to save money, fix dangerous systems, or improve delivery capability was quietly deprioritised, defunded, or handed to people who lacked the skills to continue it. This was not neglect. It was strategy.
The institutional resistance I encountered 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.