This piece is written by Rob Gates, Duco's Chief Architect and Innovation Officer, in his own words. It reflects his personal thinking, not an official Duco position.
"You know... Derek's retiring in the summer."
I heard a version of that line from two clients in the same meeting recently. Derek built the spreadsheet macros. Derek maintains the spreadsheet macros. Nobody else has ever looked at the spreadsheet macros. He's leaving in a few months, and taking the only documentation that exists, the contents of his own head, with him.
Speed and control aren't actually in tension
This is the gap that the CIO-COO relationship keeps falling into. The COO wants a platform that lets their Operations team move faster: self-service automation, and exception management that doesn't need a six-month IT project just to modify. What they want is autonomy. The CIO wants to make sure that whatever the business deploys is secure, auditable, compliant, and doesn't create a new category of operational risk every time someone has an idea. What they want is control.
These get presented as being in tension. The COO wants speed, the CIO wants governance, and the technology decision turns into a negotiation. Either the ops team gets something too locked down to be useful, or the CIO signs off on something they can't properly govern and hopes for the best.
But they're not in tension: they're the same requirement, seen from two different sides. Both are satisfied by a platform where self-service is real but operates within enforced governance boundaries, where the ops team can build and evolve their own automation, but every action is logged, every permission is explicit, and the CIO's team has visibility without needing to be in the room for every change.
Why this rarely gets built
The reason this rarely gets built is political, not technical. Technology and Operations have separate budgets, separate leadership, separate incentives, and separate vendor relationships. The ops team buys SaaS tools that solve their immediate problem. The CIO's team builds platforms that meet architectural standards. The gap between those two approaches is where Derek lives. He solves problems himself, because nobody else is going to do it quickly enough.
The CIO-COO relationship in an agentic world isn't a negotiation between speed and control. It's a shared requirement for a platform that provides both. The question is whether your architecture supports it, or whether it forces a trade-off that doesn't need to exist.
If that sounds familiar, the fix isn't a better negotiation with your COO or your CIO. It's a platform that gives one of you control and the other speed, so neither of you has to choose.
Happy retirement, Derek.