Latest - Area of Interest: Government

Professor Brian Collins CB

Professor Brian Collins CB spent his career in the public service, in the private sector and as an academic.  He met his first computer programming the speed of nuclear bomb blasts and went on to work at the defence research establishment at Malvern.  He devised night goggles and tank night-time battle systems.  At the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) he helped re-orientate it to the new role after the cold war.  Working in the private sector he amalgamated the IT systems of the world’s largest legal firm.  He worked on integrating technology to government policy and then transferred to academia.

Alastair Macdonald CB

Alastair Macdonald CB spent 32 years as a civil servant working on advice to ministers and executing policy for the IT industry. He was the civil servant in charge of the IT82 awareness campaign initiated by Lord Ken Baker. Macdonald was in charge of the privatisation of BT, a world first which started the liberalisation of the telecommunications industry. He was in charge of the Y2K efforts to avoid a catastrophe with the change of date at the start of this century. He took part in the decisions to widen the offering of mobile phone networks in the UK from two to four vendors.

Sir Frederick Crawford

Sir Frederick Crawford has a maxim which has stood him in good stead in his long career in industry and academia: never be seen moving.  He says he is like the sweeper in the game of curling: not touching the stone but influencing where it stops by sweeping in front of it.  His career has spanned four continents: Europe in the UK and France; the USA in Stamford University; and Japan and Australia where he was a visiting professor.  From 1980 to 1996 he was vice chancellor of Aston University, raising it from the bottom rung of UK universities into the top third.  He also opened the first science park in the UK.  He has never been a computer scientist nor a developer of IT but a user: IT is the servant, he says. 

Sir John Chisholm

Sir John Chisholm started his IT career in management roles at early software and systems companies like Scicon, CAP Scientific, and Sema. In 1991 he became Chief Executive of the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency, later rebranded as QinetiQ. He is perhaps best known for this role in leading QinetiQ to become an internationally successful technology services company, which floated on the London Stock Exchange in 2006. He became Chairman of QinetiQ in the same year.

Ian Watmore

Ian Watmore started his career in the IT industry as a programmer in the consultancy Arthur Anderson in 1980. He was trained by Anderson and mixed systems development with consultancy. He was the youngest equity partner in the consultancy in 1990. His work included fixing problematic public sector systems, helping South Africa develop an effective voting system and managing the UK partners who became the Accenture consultancy. He became the first Government CIO and introduced Direct.gov and helped introduce centralised .gov.uk web services.

Andrew Stott

Andrew is an international thought leader in open data. Most recently, between 2004 and 2010, as Deputy Chief Information Officer and then Director of Digital Engagement at the Cabinet Office, he delivered the globally leading data.gov.uk, in which a large number of government datasets were made available online for the first time. He has led UK Digital Engagement programmes, and is now an expert adviser, speaker and consultant on open data and e-government, both in the UK and worldwide.