Neil Lovett

Part of the IT Leaders 100 - a list of the most influential IT leaders in the UK in 2026.

Neil Lovett is a visionary Technology Director and CIO, recognised as a CIO100 leader for driving technology as a catalyst for business transformation. He has led the design of resilient digital cores across regulated professional services & FMCG/Manufacturing environments, uniting cloud, security, data and AI to deliver measurable growth and productivity.

Neil is known for translating emerging technologies into understandable business outcomes & enterprise capability. His leadership focuses on scale, trust and innovation, positioning technology not as support, but as a defining competitive advantage.

What's the most exciting part of your current role?

Variety and opportunity are the most exciting parts of my role at Ridge. As CIO, I look after everything from service desk, end user compute, infrastructure, infosec, delivery, software development and data. This leads to every day being a new and different day where I can continue to learn and grow as a person.

The opportunity (sometimes challenging) Ridge brings is vast; being able to develop a team and function from effectively zero, delivering a greenfield ERP to the business and deploying a greenfield data warehouse with accompanying dashboards are some highlights over the last year in particular.

It is the ongoing opportunity that gets me excited and motivates me on a daily basis.

What do you do in week one of a new project to avoid pain in month six?

Plan & Align. This can't be underestimated. Alignment is required on scope in detail along with measurement of success, including KPIs / frequency of measurement etc. It is critical to establish how we measure the success or phases of the implementation to hold all to account on meeting these and to promote the value created back to the Exec/Board.

If a clear plan and milestones aren't aligned with the business stakeholders and members of the team immediately, how can we expect them to meet them or understand what is required?

What’s the part of your estate you most want to simplify in 2026?

Data: When I joined Ridge, there were absolutely no dashboards or standardisation of data whatsoever. During my time here we've implemented a short-term data warehouse utilising a variety of tools with front end PowerBI to expose data that has transformed decision making in some area. However, lots more is still to do on our roadmap.

We are currently redesigning and migrating to Fabric, removing additional tools and complexity whilst improving data quality and output. In addition, we are working with an external partner to rapidly expand our reporting catalogue, particularly around the metrics our parent private equity house requires. This has allowed some great dialogue on the value of our customer base, retention, cross-sell and revenue bridge.

The next stage on our roadmap is make the platform 'AI-ready' and explore what we can accomplish with agents for exposing data quality issues, increasing the speed at which we deliver and gaining additional insights to the business.

I feel data is key for any business wanting to gain competitive advantage in the near future as without clear, well managed data it is impossible to make good, well thought out decisions for the future

Excluding smartphones, what piece of technology could you not live without and why?

Voice activated assistant: I use these daily in and out of the home and it has become a natural way of life. The time saving and effort of multiple tasks being rolled up into one voice command has permeated into many lives and one that would be a challenge to return from!

What excites you most about the future of IT?

The promise of autonomy; bringing together multiple recent innovations to one technology stack that can solve wider problems. AI alone won't be able to transform businesses and requires creative thinking, natural language processing, automation tooling, clear data pipelines etc.

This convergence of many technologies (mobile, web, AI, automation, data) has a clear ability to solve many of the industry problems and propel the power of IT forward.

What talent are you quietly proud of that would never show up on LinkedIn?

Creativity - being a technology professional doesn't usually allude to this quality. However, I really pride myself on keeping some elements here.

I play the piano and have done for over 35 years, having gained various certificates and shortlisted to young musician of the year for my home region during my secondary school time. This creativity allows me to step away from work and detach myself to renew myself!

It is extremely difficult in this age to disengage from work, as we are 'always on'. This creativity helps me recharge and focus when back in the office to give my best.

What’s your most-used keyboard shortcut or command that you wish everyone knew?

Windows-L. Not used enough and a really basic, easy step to help secure your device! How many times do we see devices left unlocked in general with potential clients in offices or in the event of evacuation? It only takes one second compared to clicking and locking manually.