Computing is all about the IT leader - whether that's the CIO, CTO, IT director, chief architect or any one of dozens of other titles. Having spoken to hundreds of IT leaders over the last 12 months and beyond, we feel well qualified to produce the definitive rankings for the top 100 IT leaders in the UK.
To produce this list we took into account factors like size of organisation, size of department, annual budget, duration in role and level of transformation achieved. Then, in consultation with industry experts, we undertook the incredibly challenging task of producing the final list - a task which became ever trickier the closer to the top we got.
Do you feel that you should be on this list? Should you be placed higher? Then contact the editorial team, we'll arrange an interview and next year, it could be you sitting at the top.
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Andy Caddy
CIO, Virgin Active
Since joining Virgin Active, Caddy has been focused on digitising the customer service it provides to its members. This is a process that involves communicating with its customers and bringing up-to-date the company's internal systems and processes.
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Liam Maxwell
CTO, HM Government
"We are now going for 'government as a platform'," Maxwell told Computing. "There are so many things that had been siloed in the past. We had different case management systems, different identity systems, and we had 392 websites that had nothing in common." The drive towards open standards led by the GDS will enable more and more cross-government IT platforms to emerge as old, more proprietary approaches to delivering IT are phased out and new, more uniform systems are brought on-stream. "We are now going for 'government as a platform'," Maxwell tells Computing. "There are so many things that had been siloed in the past. We had different case management systems, different identity systems, and we had 392 websites that had nothing in common." The drive towards open standards led by the GDS will enable more and more cross-government IT platforms to emerge as old, more proprietary approaches to delivering IT are phased out and new, more uniform systems are brought on-stream.
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Trevor Attridge
Global Director - Data & Technology, MEC
With a strong media and digital focus Attridge is responsible for MEC's global technology strategy and vision, a position he has held for almost four years. He enjoys the centrality of the CIO role in the digital age. "As CIOs I think we're uniquely positioned across the business because we're hyper connected and see everything that's going on in all facets of the business," he said. "There's always the desire to make everyone's lives better from a working perspective, making the difference for our teams that then making a difference for our clients … on a personal level that's very gratifying", he says.
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Clifford Burroughs
CIO, United Biscuits
Burroughs has been responsible for a wide Google-based architectural overhaul across the country, adopting cloud and flexible mobile working while making huge savings by cutting out paper. He's also cut down burden on IT help desks by installing such a consumerised level of technology.
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Steve Townsend
CIO, Transport for London
Townsend has been busy tying up deals with suppliers this year in a bid to improve the IT at TfL. TfL has signed a £6.5m deal with O2 for mobile networking services, and has also signed a £6m deal with Atos for a service desk solution. It has also appointed 12 suppliers onto its IT solutions framework including CSC, Infosys and Sopra Steria.
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Rocco Labellarte
CIO, Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead
Labellarte has been in his post for 3 years now, having come from similar roles in Cambridgeshire & Northamptonshire County Councils. In this role he has pushed towards making it the first local government body to use an entirely cloud infrastructure, a process in which he says retaining in-house skills has been one of his main challenges. "If you have them in-house, you're constantly fighting to ensure you keep those people within your organisation."
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Richard Cross
CIO & CDO, Atkins
Cross is now not only CIO, but CDO of the engineering juggernaut Atkins. Cross aims to ensure that all of the company's systems are in the cloud in five years' time, and that 'digital' and 'agile' are the default way of working.
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Darrell Stein
CIO, Reckitt Benckiser
Stein believes he has brought two main areas of expertise to RB; cyber security and data. He is currently running a digital transformation initiative dubbed the 'Connected Company Programme' which involves connecting all of the company's data sources, while he is also modernising the firm's core infrastucture and looking into new areas such as the Internet of Things.
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John Linwood
CTO, Wood Mackenzie
A founder of three successful startups and having been a key and valued senior leader in three of the world's largest players in the technology space (Microsoft, Yahoo and BBC), John has a high degree of technology, commercial and leadership ability on a global scale that has proven itself repeatedly throughout his impressive and distinguished career.
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Fin Goulding
CTO, Paddy Power
In the three years since he arrived at Paddy Power, Goulding has transformed the organisation's IT infrastructure so that now it can focus on a smaller number of initiatives. As well as looking into software-defined infrastructure and data centres, the firm is continually spending time on trying to pull together customer, operational and technical data in order to give it new insights.