‘I worry about our ability to go fast enough’: interview with Mivy James, chief technology officer for UK Defence
A technologist at heart, Mivy James is working in the Ministry of Defence and at a time when UK defence is undergoing a major overhaul. She tells Jack Aldane about the lure of working to tackle big challenges, why AI is not ‘pixie dust’, and her fears about the pace of change
“I feel like I’ve come full circle, but hopefully it’s not the end of the circle.”
This is how Mivy James, chief technology officer for UK Defence at the Ministry of Defence (MoD), refers to her career to date and her future ambitions.
A coder from a young age, James has been engaged in digital technology in one form or another since she was a child. During school holidays she would earn money coding industrial control systems, and went on to complete a degree in computer science and mathematics at the University of Manchester.
“When I started working properly after university, I worked in a company that got consumed by a much bigger organisation doing systems integration and operational research and what we would now call ‘synthetic environments’ and ‘digital twins’, not exclusively, but largely in the defence and security sector,” James says.
This is what she means by coming full circle – because all these years later, she is again working in the defence sector, having started in her current role in February 2024.
James’s road to government
After her first post-university job, James worked in numerous other sectors, including a stint as director of digital transformation at BAE Systems in 2021.
Her move to the MoD can be attributed in part to her increasing work in thought leadership around digital transformation at the time, and her interest in “the scale of the challenge” the Ministry of Defence faced and continues to face.
Increasing geopolitical tensions, a greater focus on national security and resilience and an accompanying boost in investment, as well as recognition of the need to accelerate digital transformation to ensure UK defence is optimised to take on whatever comes its way, makes it a particularly dynamic environment to work in. James says she was attracted to being part of the machine tackling current and future challenges.
Indeed, she might be “a bit of a glutton for punishment” in choosing to enter the role at such a sharp inflection point in history, she says, but she was lured back by the “fascinating” technical challenge of blending “an amazing combination of mainstream technologies” with what she calls “exquisite” technologies.
By this, James means technological solutions that are “one-offs, entirely unique and might be the only instance of that particular technology anywhere”.
Read more: UK government defence review pledges to ‘accelerate innovation to a wartime pace’
Reflections after year one, the ‘digital backbone’ and tackling obsolescence
In a blogpost published on the UK government’s website in February 2025, James reflected on her first year at the MoD and outlined her team’s core priorities. These included fully activating what the MoD calls “the digital backbone” of UK defence. As James explains in the post, this digital backbone “powers everything: from soldiers and vehicles to aircraft, ships, satellites, and drones”.
As she wrote: “Think of [the backbone] as our ‘true cloud’. It ensures data and digital services are available wherever and whenever they’re needed, enabling edge computing and rapid decision-making.
“The digital backbone is a living, reusable architecture that drives efficiency and interoperability. By reducing duplication and embracing APIs, we’re creating a more open and agile system that adapts to operational needs.”
Now, she says UK Defence has “a lot of the core ingredients of the digital backbone” but that it needs “maturing” and “stitching together”, particularly when it comes to its application across defence domains and front- and back-office systems – all with a focus on reuse and resilience.
“There’s a whole transformation piece around that, shifting to an ecosystem of digital services. And as ever, it’s not just about the tech, the cultural change is probably just as hard if not a bigger challenge.”
She says the team have done a good deal of digital transformation in the fixed environment and what she calls the “lower classification tiers”, referring to efforts to work in a more cloud-based and agile way when it comes to software.
This has been a “long slog – you don’t just flick a switch and change things overnight”, she says. Now the focus is on transformation “in the higher tiers and the deployed environment in terms of ways of working, how we and how users access capability, and how we develop software capability as well. We run the risk of a bit of a digital divide there that could drive the wrong behaviours”.
Other priorities she highlighted in her 2025 blogpost, which remain a focus today, include tackling technology obsolescence, which she described then as “the unwanted party guest… always there, but no one wants to talk about it”. While artificial intelligence “is stealing the spotlight”, James warns that obsolescent tech drains budget and energy from government teams, duplicating work “without adding value”.
“If we can free up the sunk costs tied to outdated systems, we’ll deliver more [and] faster within the same budget,” her blog concluded.
Tackling technology obsolescence and achieving rationalisation requires migrating and replacing parts of the system but she warns that “what’s often easier to do is to buy shiny new things, like a widget, and stick that in our technology enterprise. But I’d argue, actually, that often increases the complexity. We should be doing more of a decluttering activity and thinking if we bring in a new thing, what is it that we’re going to retire?”.
As she mentions, there is a dashboard, maintained by her team, that scores critical defence systems against criteria set out by the Cabinet Office for obsolescence and makes that visible to senior leaders “to help make sure that we’re getting the investment to address what we need to”.
AI pedantry and the illusion of ‘pixie dust’
If working in the UK defence space was an alluring prospect for James when she joined the MoD in early 2024, it is even more so now.
The context behind her current work and work across the MoD is a major overhaul of the country’s defence architecture. The government published its Strategic Defence Review in June last year and is embarking on what defence secretary John Healey called the “deepest defence reforms for 50 years”, focused in part on innovation and novel technology.
Artificial intelligence will play a part. James’s earlier comment about AI stealing the spotlight provides a clue about the way she observes it can be unhelpfully perceived – and she provides a caution about its limitations.
She is “a pedant” when it comes to talking about AI, she says, partly because she has been around it long enough to know how related terms and categorisations are commonly misused and misapplied.
“What a lot of people refer to as ‘AI’ has been around for a long time and is often what I would just call ‘code’ or ‘an algorithm’,” she says.
“There are lots of different use cases for AI across defence, but I see it as a continuation of the journey that we’re already on around digitising our systems, our processes, and improving our productivity.”
For James, the biggest misconception people have about AI is that it will produce better outcomes wherever and however it is implemented. AI is not, as James puts it, “some kind of pixie dust” created in a vacuum, but rather “a continuation” of the very first advances in computer science.
The extent to which AI delivers benefits depends on “underpinnings” such as making sure “the right data is used for the right things”, James emphasises.
“My ask is that everybody’s thinking about the whole hierarchy of needs for AI and not thinking of it as a widget that you can throw in the mix, and suddenly everything’s magic.”
How not to become a ‘self-licking ice cream’
James describes what she thinks is needed to drive reform and to operate more effectively beyond technology – focusing on the make-up and expertise of the people at the MoD.
In the first in this series of interviews with leaders in defence, Tim Ketton-Locke, director of the Defence Office for Small Business Growth, told Global Government Forum that he was struck by the spirit of patriotism when he joined the MoD.
James says a “fascination with the mission” is what draws people to work at the MoD, but that this can reinforce a tendency for the machine as a whole to be inward-looking and not to take advantage of expertise gained in other sectors.
“Sometimes we run the risk of being a ‘self-licking ice cream’ in that there are a lot of people who have deep defence expertise, but do not have practical lived experience of technology in other sectors,” she says.
What government needs, therefore, is a mixture of deep defence expertise and “folks who fund digital in other sectors”, to counter the often-posited view that “only people who work in defence can work in defence”.
“I don’t buy that,” she says. “We need to be less protective. We all know that you end up with better solutions by having a more diverse group of people working together, so let’s not be late to the party on that thinking.”
And she adds that UK Defence could “go a lot faster by begging, borrowing and stealing” from sectors such as utilities, big pharma and banking that have solved many of the problems the MoD needs to address.
Read more: UK to bolster defence intelligence through AI partnership with Alan Turing Institute
Diversity in defence
Getting in the right skills mix will also mean embracing diversity in the defence workforce, a theme also raised by Ketton-Locke in his interview. Like him, James sees signs that neurodiversity is being taken more seriously in defence, though she thinks it’s the more obscure area when it comes to diversity awareness.
“Neurodiversity is harder to track, because people have to self-declare it, and be willing to share that information about themselves,” she says.
As for gender diversity, James notes that there is a gender balance when it comes to the digital leaders she is surrounded by. “We have a very gender-balanced leadership team, which feels really positive, but at the same time, it makes it way more startling when I step outside that environment into the wider space,” she says.
She gives the example of a defence conference in London – at which she spoke about neurodiversity last year – which drew 60,000 attendees from over 60 countries.
As she notes, even at defence events that draw such large crowds, broad representation is not a given. She says she would like defence events to feel closer to “a normal tech conference”, where people come from a wide range of professions and backgrounds to offer their skills and perspectives to the cause of national and international security.
“I think it just shows that we still have a long way to go with diversity in defence. And I think there’s an urgency for us to make more progress in that space,” she says.
A foot on the accelerator
The need for urgency is a theme James returns to again and again.
Having worked in technology and defence in one form or another for more than 40 years, James reiterates that innovations involving technology such as AI that may be a novelty to many of us have been part of a continuum for people who, like her, have been at the coalface for decades.
Nevertheless, when James was first employed as a coder in the 1980s, the UK’s defence needs were very different to what they are now. In 2026, many governments face daunting defence challenges that demand a step-change in the use of tech and the rebuilding of operational capacity. No-one, no matter how qualified to develop solutions to the challenges, can avoid feeling occasionally unnerved by the task.
James says she is not a good sleeper at the best of times, and shares what keeps her up at night. “I just worry about pace and our ability to go fast enough, whether it’s about the ability to do decision-making, or to develop the capabilities we need at the pace we need,” she says.
If the government is to achieve its ambitious defence reforms, it will need to press its foot on the accelerator.
Read more: Australian government creates new agency to streamline defence delivery
About Jack Aldane
Jack is a British journalist, cartoonist and podcaster. He graduated from Heythrop College London in 2009 with a BA in philosophy, before living and working in China for three years as a freelance reporter. After training in financial journalism at City University from 2013 to 2014, Jack worked at Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters before moving into editing magazines on global trade and development finance. Shortly after editing opinion writing for UnHerd, he joined the independent think tank ResPublica, where he led a media campaign to change the health and safety requirements around asbestos in UK public buildings. As host and producer of The Booking Club podcast – a conversation series featuring prominent authors and commentators at their favourite restaurants – Jack continues to engage today’s most distinguished thinkers on the biggest problems pertaining to ideology and power in the 21st century. He joined Global Government Forum as its Senior Staff Writer and Community Co-ordinator in 2021.
