Charles Ewen - Met Office - Top 250 UK IT Leaders

Charles Ewen - Director of Technology and CIO, Met Office

Computing staff
20 May 2019

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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.