Charles Ewen - Director of Technology and CIO, Met Office
What's your proudest work-related achievement of the last 12 months?
Delivering a large efficiency programme (about 15 per cent revenue) for the organisation alongside ‘BAU' in terms of development and services. This has been a very tough period for the organisation, however, our need to reduce operating costs has not stopped our progress in technology transformation where we continue to deliver world-class technology to support our world-leading science and services.
What's the number one skill today's IT leaders need?
To be an integrated part of the organisation that they work for. Just having a good relationship with the business is no longer enough in many organisations that are striving to realise the opportunities and mitigate the threats from rapidly changing technology drivers. One reason I am proud of the programme above given that only about one per cent of people efficiencies came from technology, is that it demonstrates that I am considered to ‘be the business' in a truly integrated sense.
How many people work in IT in your organisation?
Around 500 in a federated model and around 320 within the Technology directorate.
What's your top priority for the next 12 months?
Legacy deprecation and accelerating next-generation IT capabilities in the public cloud.
What's your annual IT budget?
Confidential.
Top 250 UK IT Leaders
More on Leadership
'Now more than ever leadership needs to recognise the value of rest' - Women in Tech Festival speaker Dr Nerina Ramlakhan
Physiologist Dr Ramlakhan tells Computing how she’s helping businesses prevent burnout during lockdown, and her hopes for next month’s Women in Tech Festival
Sprawl and silos: how Fivetran is using automation to extract value from data
Integrating data into workflows is a prevalent challenge - is automation the way to solve it?
Congratulations to the winners of the Digital Technology Leaders Awards 2020
The world has needed these people and projects more than ever this year
Winners announced for Computing's DevOps Excellence Awards
2020 has pushed the need for flexible, agile working to the fore, and both the entries to and winners of the DevOps Excellence Awards reflected that move
