From the engine room to the boardroom

I started in IT in the early 1980s — mainframes, COBOL, batch jobs, punched cards. I spent the next four decades inside one organisation, the Trivalor group, watching every transition that mattered in enterprise technology happen up close.

I retired in 2025 as Chief Information Officer and Chief Information Security Officer of a 24,000-employee group with €900M in annual revenue. The reason I stayed in one place that long is the same reason I’m now doing this independently: I had a seat at the table where the decisions actually got made, and I learned how rare and valuable that perspective is.

What I actually did

Over four decades I was responsible for taking the group through every major IT transition: Y2K, the Euro, two full ERP renewals, the migration to SAP, ISO 27001 and ISO 20000 certifications, COVID continuity for 24,000 employees, a brownfield migration to S/4HANA, the rollout of Salesforce, integration via Mulesoft, and the first wave of enterprise AI — including production deployments of IBM Watson, Microsoft Copilot, and Google AI through our Activate AI programme.

I sat on boards. I signed off on multi-million euro contracts. I owned the consequences when they went well and when they didn’t. I led teams of senior managers through Y2K, the financial crisis, the cloud transition, and a global pandemic. I served as President of GUSP — the Portuguese SAP Users Group — across multiple terms between 2012 and 2025, sitting at the intersection of vendor roadmaps and enterprise reality.

This isn’t a CV. It’s the basis for how I read your situation.

Why I’m doing this now

After four decades on the inside, I have a clear view of where boards and CFOs get bad advice: from the people who’ll also get paid to execute it. There’s a structural conflict of interest that nobody at the table is incentivised to point out.

I retired with the financial freedom to choose my next chapter. I chose this one because the gap is real — and because I have a specific kind of value to offer that the market generally doesn’t supply: senior executive judgement, decoupled from implementation revenue.

I operate as Luisferreira Consulting OÜ, an Estonian private limited company. The Estonian base gives me a clean, fully digital platform to operate across the EU with one entity, one contract, one invoice — regardless of where my clients are based.

Credentials: 40+ years at Trivalor Group · CIO and CISO (2010–2025) · President, GUSP – Portuguese SAP Users Group (2012–2025, multiple terms) · PADE Executive Programme, AESE Business School · ISACA Member.