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 Wolfe
CIO, Shop Direct
Shop Direct Group CIO Wolfe has been hard at work on several different IT projects, including a 'personalised sort order' trial in which customers are targeted with products that fit their history and preferences. The firm used a combination of Hadoop, for which it uses the Hortonworks distribution and SAS analytics to analyse a customer's previous transactions and preferences, so that it could use them to show specific products to consumers first with the aim of increasing sales and customer satisfaction.
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Peter Hambling
CIO, Lloyd's of London
Hambling has been CIO at insurance market Lloyd's for over eight years. In that time he has re-engineered the Lloyd's data warehouses and data martks, migrated all legacy process & data, and rapidly expanded to meet new demands.
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Albert Hitchcock
CIO, Pearson
Pearson appointed Hitchcock as its CIO in February 2014. Hitchcock had previously been CIO of Vodafone where he was responsible for the IT teams within Vodafone and its operating companies. Hitchcock is a Fellow of the Institute of Engineering and Technology - FIET and a Chartered Engineer.
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Ed Garcez
CIO, Tri-Borough
Garcez has the difficult task of being the CIO of three councils, a role which he started last year. He has been busy putting his stamp on the 'tri-borough' by restructuring the IT teams, doing more business with SMEs, and trying to get more out of big data.
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Jane Moran
CIO, Unilever
Moran was appointed Global CIO of Unilever in June 2014. She previously worked at Thomson Reuters in several different roles. First, she was VP of Business Systems at Thomson Financial, before becoming CIO of Thompson Financial in 2006. She then became CIO of the Markets Division in April 2008, before becoming Global CIO of Thompson Reuters in October 2010.
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Carlos Morgado
CTO, Just Eat
Morgado has led the transformation of an IT strategy which has seen the online takeaway ordering service shift its infrastructure from an internal system, to one running on Amazon cloud servers. The transformation means Just Eat can spin up the additional servers it needs during the peak times of day people are ordering food, enabling a fast, efficient and reliable service to be used - an expand - across multiple countries
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Shiva Kumar
Group IT director, Snow & Rock
As group IT director of a growing retail chain, Kumar faces a number of challenges in supporting that growth, such as providing systems that can scale as the company expands, while implementing projects enabling, for example, shop floor staff to be able to take orders over tablet computers. ""We want staff to do more with them than just ringing up the sales.... we want it to be an effective selling tool to showcase products, check stock or arrange deliveries.
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Clive Selley
Group CIO, BT
In a career at BT since 1981, Selley has technically spearheaded many of BT's recent major technology projects, including the company's TV Launch. Clive is also CEO of the BT Technoloy, Service and Operations Group.
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Stuart Hughes
CTO, Laterooms.com
One of the youngest in Computing's IT Leaders list, Hughes is keen to ensure that younger IT staff have the same opportunities he had. That's why he's building what he calls 'the Barcelona of IT', building a home grown team of professionals who are encouraged to be creative, a policy which has led to creative strategies and have helped Laterooms become one of the market leaders in the online travel sector.
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Steve Halliday
CIO, Solihull Borough Council
CIOs in local authorities have arguably had to do more with less over the past five years. Halliday, with an annual budget of about £11m, though, has introduced a full bring-your-own-device strategy, combined with efficiency and procurement savings. Savings have been driven from, for example, implementing open-source web content management and putting applications and data in the cloud.
