IT Essentials: A fresh perspective

Talking to your peers is the best way to approach the challenge of modern IT

Sometimes, a conversation will give you a totally new perspective on a topic. It feels like something shifts in your head, and you see a challenge in a new (hopefully more manageable) light.

That happened at least five times a day at our annual IT Leaders Summit, held last week at Down Hall in Essex. It's difficult to be surrounded by some of the UK's most impressive CIOs and not come away with your brain buzzing with new ideas.

For example, Alex Foster, director of Division X at BT, mentioned that the lines between CFO/CRO and CIO roles are blurring as tech becomes more and more heavily integrated into the business.

"The CIO is as much a part of a CRO as anybody. If we look at the technologies coming down the track such as AI, machine learning, data analytics, they all have a crucial part to play in growing revenues."

There's been a huge amount of discussion in the IT community about tech leaders moving into business roles, but that normally means the CIO (CTO, CDO, CISO etc) transitioning to CEO. Taking on responsibility for revenues is a new approach, but one that could make a huge amount of sense - if there's interest.

Not only are IT and business strategies now essentially merging, but CFO and CIO roles share the skills necessary for success: not only understanding the hard numbers, but being able to translate that into a story the board can understand.

Olivia Schofield, an award-winning keynote speaker, was on hand to help with that, running an excellent session on communication. Not what you might expect at an IT conference, but delegates agreed that they'd learned a huge amount.

Olivia will also be speaking at the Women in Tech Festival later this month.

There were many other brilliant takeaways from the event's two days. Did you know, for example, that although the construction industry is rated only just above agriculture in people's perceptions of its technology use, it actually employs thousands of data scientists? And that although budgets are a concern, most CIOs are actually spending more on security, salaries and cloud - while cutting back on consulting, outsourcing and training?

The Computing team has already written about some of the insightful sessions at the event - click here, here and here - and we'll have plenty more over the next few days.

Make sure you keep an eye on our events page, because the IT Leaders Summit will return next year.

In other news:

We spoke to Wayne Johncock, former CIO at Centrica and MOSL, about a scam that cost him and his wife £400,000. Not only do the facts tell their own enraging story of betrayal, but the end of the article highlights the bureaucratic mess that is data protection in the UK.

John Leonard talked to Teradata CEO Steve McMillan about the company's cloud and AI plans; and Mudassar Ulhaq, CIO at Waverton Investment Management, took us through his efforts to bring an established financial services firm into the 21st century.