Bridging the Gap at automotiveIT Kongress
How Bentley wants to speed up decisions and delivery
Matthias Müller has been CIO of Bentley Motors since May 2026. He previously held senior IT roles at Audi, including CIO of Audi Hungaria and Platform Owner Global Cloud Infrastructure for the Volkswagen Group.
Markus Brönner
At the automotiveIT Kongress 2026, Bentley CIO Matthias Müller explained how permanent delivery teams, shared ownership and common backlogs are meant to turn strategy into execution faster despite tight budgets, limited capacity and competing IT priorities across the organisation.
At Bentley, the difficult part of IT transformation is not necessarily defining the strategy. The bigger challenge begins after a decision has been made. “The question at the end of the day is not how to formulate the best strategy,” said Matthias Müller, CIO of Bentley Motors. What matters, he argued at the automotiveIT Kongress 2026, is what happens next. His presentation, “Bridging the Gap: How IT Turns Strategy into Reality”, focused on the structures and decision-making processes that determine whether strategic intent turns into results.
For Bentley, execution is also shaped by scale. The British luxury carmaker employs around 4,000 people and cannot address every requirement or technical challenge at once. Müller therefore wants an operating model that makes priorities, capacity and accountability visible. The move forms part of Bentley’s broader digital transformation, in which IT systems, data foundations and manufacturing readiness are becoming increasingly closely connected.
Why does execution slow down after strategy?
Müller has been Bentley’s CIO since May 2026. Before joining the company, he worked in Audi IT under CIO Frank Loydl, most recently as Platform Owner Global Cloud Infrastructure, and previously spent four years leading IT at Audi Hungaria. During his first weeks at Bentley, he found that the real drag on execution often appeared only after a strategic decision had already been taken.
The follow-up questions were numerous: Which people are actually available? Which projects need to be delayed or stopped? How should enterprise architecture, cybersecurity and the business functions be involved? Müller said these individual decisions consumed an “incredible amount of time”. The issue was therefore less a shortage of strategic direction than the way responsibility and capacity were organised afterwards.
He identified three recurring causes. Responsibility was fragmented across projects, services, budgets and architectural decisions, leaving clear owners for individual areas but often no one accountable for the overall outcome. Bentley also relied heavily on temporary project teams. They offered flexibility, but each new project required teams to rebuild knowledge and working relationships. Once a project ended, the team was dissolved and the resulting product moved into operations, together with its running costs and any technical debt accumulated along the way.
A third source of friction was that many decisions were made outside the teams expected to execute them. The consequences for capacity, technical dependencies and day-to-day operations therefore often became visible only later. These effects reinforced one another and pushed operational decisions back up the hierarchy. Across the industry, automotive IT has become a strategic lever for transformation, but Bentley’s experience shows that strategy alone does not remove organisational bottlenecks.
How do permanent delivery teams change accountability?
Bentley’s answer is to replace changing project structures with long-lived delivery teams made up of IT and business specialists. These teams are intended to own products and services across the full lifecycle – from development and operation to further enhancement and eventual retirement. Capacity, operating stability and cost are considered from the start rather than handed over as somebody else’s problem once development is complete.
That changes the traditional division of labour in which the business defines requirements and IT is responsible for delivery. Müller wants both sides to share responsibility for the outcome and for the consequences of their decisions. “Both sides, IT and business, also have to demonstrate the same result,” he said.
IT architects and software developers work alongside experts from the relevant business functions. Each delivery team is led jointly by one person from the business and one from IT, with both able to make binding operational decisions. The same team handles new functionality, smaller changes, ongoing operations and technical improvements. Knowledge and accountability therefore remain in place beyond an individual project.
This also reflects a broader change in automotive organisations, where IT and engineering have to work much more closely together as products, processes and digital platforms become more interdependent. Bentley’s model, however, is focused particularly on who owns delivery and who has the authority to make trade-offs.
There are parallels with the Target Operating Model used in Audi IT. Audi has been moving towards value streams rather than organising primarily around individual applications, with processes, data and IT considered from the perspective of the business outcome. Bentley is applying a related logic at delivery-team level. The structures are not identical, but both approaches aim to reduce the distance between business responsibility and IT execution.
Why does a shared backlog force real priorities?
One of the most consequential changes is in prioritisation. Projects and operations have often been managed separately even though they draw on the same people and the same financial resources. Bentley is now bringing this work together in shared backlogs. A request for a new feature therefore competes directly with maintenance, automation, operational work and the reduction of technical debt.
Müller described the change as apparently simple, but its effect is significant. Each team has a defined capacity and is also expected to receive its own budget. That creates a visible limit to the amount of work that can realistically be accepted.
Under the previous model, new requirements were often added on top of existing commitments. In practice, individual employees then had to decide what could still be done. The new model makes the trade-off explicit: if another task is added, something else may have to move, slow down or stop.
Bentley’s 2027 budget planning provides an early example. Under continuing cost pressure, teams have to decide whether scarce capacity should go into new business functionality, automation or reductions in operating cost. Müller said this is already changing the discussion with the business. Business functions are engaging more closely with traditional IT questions such as operating-cost optimisation and are weighing requirements against each other before they even enter the IT portfolio.
Once a priority has been agreed jointly, the regular – in some cases daily – interaction between business and IT is intended to keep execution on track. The approach is designed to replace a sequence of handovers with continuous ownership.
How much autonomy can delivery teams really have?
Müller also wants financial authority to move closer to the teams. Bentley is working towards allocating budgets directly to delivery teams so that their business and IT leads can decide how to use those funds within agreed limits. The aim is to shorten routine approval paths and keep decisions closer to the work itself.
Autonomy, however, is not intended to mean freedom from standards. “In my view, autonomy only works within clear guardrails,” Müller said. Those guardrails include enterprise architecture, cybersecurity, quality management and financial management. They define technical standards, mandatory platforms and boundaries for investment.
This balance between autonomy and control is becoming a wider issue as carmakers build more integrated, cross-functional product organisations. Moving decisions closer to delivery can increase speed, but it also makes common architecture, security and governance rules more important. Without them, teams can optimise locally while creating complexity elsewhere.
For issues that individual teams cannot resolve themselves, Bentley is establishing joint governance between business and IT. It is intended to mediate dependencies between product and platform teams and support larger budget shifts. Where possible, Müller wants such shifts to be incorporated into annual planning cycles.
The governance layer is not supposed to reapprove decisions that teams are authorised to make. Its purpose is to create transparency, resolve conflicts and define binding conditions. Müller describes the target as “lean but strong governance”.
What still has to prove the operating model works?
Bentley’s new operating model is still in an early implementation phase. Müller stressed that it has not yet been fully introduced. The concept has been aligned across several management levels, including the board, and has been received positively. He nevertheless did not present hard metrics showing shorter lead times or lower costs.
Early changes are visible in how the organisation works. Business functions and IT are collaborating more closely, operational decisions are moving towards the delivery teams, and fewer people need to be involved in each decision. Müller wants the model fully established by the end of 2026.
The transformation is also about identity. IT employees can sometimes feel far removed from the vehicle and the customer-facing product, Müller said. In the longer term, he wants employees to identify more strongly with their delivery team regardless of whether they come from IT or a business function.
None of the individual principles is especially radical. Müller himself described permanent teams and shared accountability as “not rocket science”. The challenge is in combining them consistently. Stable teams without decision rights can achieve little. Extensive autonomy without shared objectives can encourage teams to optimise only their own results.
Bentley is therefore trying to bring decision rights, accountability, capacity and budgets together at the point where execution actually happens. Whether that closes the gap between strategy and delivery will become measurable only once the model has been running long enough to show effects on lead times, costs and operational performance.
