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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David Wilde
CIO, Essex County Council
Wilde is CIO at Essex County Council having moved from Westminster Council over 3 years ago. He says he can't see himself working anywhere but the public sector. Wilde hass expanded on his CIO role 6 months ago having been given responsibility for Place Operations at Essex Countly Council where he has been for 4 years. A public sector man through and through he said: "I just love the diversity of it ... making a difference and driving efficiency and being involved and influencing the implementation of how public service is delivered ... the private sector's never really appealed to the same extent. "
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John Cronin
CIO, An Post
Cronin works at Ireland's equivalent to the Post Office - called An Post. One of the biggest projects the firm has worked on is using an Oracle BI solution. He told Computing that the project will save the firm 1.3 million Euros.
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Mark Ridley
Director of technology, Reed.co.uk
Ridley has CIO at employment firm Reed for 7 years. Previously he was head of technology. He sees the CIO role as a supportive one, and is a strong believer in allowing his staff the space to experiment in order to innovate.
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Martin Davies
CIO, Bet365
Davies has taken a different approach to many other CIOs - he's not interested in 'fasionable' technologies or ways of working including DevOps, BYOD and cloud computing. "One of the biggest problems with IT is that it is very fashion driven... we're in a world now where we are getting a lot of flip-flopping from one thing to another. It's almost like if Captain Kirk's Enterprise gets shot by a torpedo and he just runs from one side of the bridge to another, because he's following the latest trends," he told Computing.
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Michael Ibbitson
CIO, Gatwick Airport
Managing the IT infrastructure behind the UK's second largest airport isn't an easy task, but Michael Ibbitson and his 100 strong team manage everything across Gatwick. Successful schemes have included using big data and analytics to improve landing and takeoff management. But Ibbitson isn't stopping there, with plans to make Gatwick the 'Uber of aviation'.
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Angus McCallum
Global CIO, BG Group
Leading a team of over 200 IT staff at multinational oil and gas company BG Group, Global CIO McCallum has overseen an IT policy journey. It's once which has taken the firm and it's 5000 staff across 20 countries from a federated model to "a truly global" model through deployment of SaaS model for a number of applications.
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Chris Taylor
COO, News UK
Taylor joined News UK in 2011 as Director of Enterprise Technologies. He became CIO in September 2012 and COO in June 2013. He has recently led three major projects to modernise News UK's technology and processes including a £30m programme dubbed Newsroom 360 which aims to reorganise the newsrooms of The Sun, The Times and The Sunday Times and re-engineer them from the ground up.
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Thierry Bedos
CIO, Hotels.com
"Making sure the experience between the mobile device and the desktop is joined up" forms one of the key marks of success for Bedos, something which he's achieved at Hotels.com. By using mobile and big data technology, Hotels.com users are able to pick up from where they left off any time they return to the site. And returning, they most definitely are, of the figure of 35 million app downloads is anything to go by.
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Edel McGrath
CIO, KPMG UK
McGrath began her role at KPMG in 2012, and quickly went to work to bring the technology up to date at the firm. She created an IT strategy that involved rolling out 12,000 new hybrid laptop-tablet devices. She has since worked with her peers to determine what the company will do next with its enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.
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Rob Harding
CIO, Capital One
Capital One might be a US-based financial institution, but it is well-established in the UK. Indeed, Harding joined Capital One as a member of its IT team in 1999 and worked his way up to become CIO in 2010. As CIO, Harding has masterminded an "innovation programme", which saw the implementation of a new workflow engine to improve the company's adaptability and a refresh of Capital One's Nottingham data centre.
