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Latest - Decades: 2010s

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David Barker

David Barker was one of the UK’s first internet entrepreneurs in 1994 and spent ten years working with global corporations including Intel, Cisco and Microsoft. In 2004 he became a social entrepreneur to tackle some of the issues facing society such as social mobility, unemployment and poverty.

Since 2005 David has been innovating new social enterprise start-ups using Tech for Good. In 2015 he founded Techcentre, The Social Innovation Agency, to work in partnership with clients to innovate new tech-enabled social enterprise start-ups.

David Clarke MBE

David Clarke spent nearly thirty years involved with IT systems, firstly in the supply side and then from 1995 to 2002 as a Chief Executive in the Virgin group of companies, and then Trinity Mirror plc, both companies being highly reliant on the use of IT based systems for their success. David became Group Chief Executive of the BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, in May 2002 and was widely acknowledged as having transformed BCS into the customer-service oriented professional institute for the IT and Communications profession that it became. David was awarded an MBE for services to the IT Industry in the 2011 New Years Honours.

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.

Sir Peter Rigby

Sir Peter Rigby left school and joined the computer industry working for NCR, Honeywell and the Diebold consultancy. In 1975 with £2,000 of his own money he launched SCR, a recruitment agency for IT staff. Seven years later he sold the company for £1 million. He ploughed the cash back into growing IT enterprises with his eye always on developing a large organisation. He has kept the company privately owned by his family in order to preserve the values he sees as vital in business.

Doron Swade MBE

Doron Swade. He is an engineer, historian, museum professional and scholar who publishes and lectures widely on the history of computing, curatorship and museology. He is the author of more than eighty articles and four books. At the Science Museum in London he was curator of computing and responsible for the national computing collection. He is a leading authority on the works and life of Charles Babbage. During his tenure at the London Science Museum he directed, managed, fund-raised and publicised the construction of the first mechanical calculating engine from original nineteenth century designs by [Charles] Babbage. In 1989 he founded the Computer Conservation Society and in 2009 was awarded an MBE for his services to the history of computing in the New Year’s Honours List.

Andy Ayim

Andy Ayim moves in the world of venture capital, tech start-ups, and product development. In 2010 Andy, along with his brother, Kwabz and a few friends set up Mixtape Madness, a passion project to create a central location online for people to listen to UK hip-hop and grime music.

He is currently Managing Director of the London Accelerator at Backstage Capital, that looks for investment opportunities with companies founded by those from under-represented groups, including women, people of colour, and the LGBT community.

In 2018 Andy was named in the Financial Times as one of the top ten most influential black and minority ethnic tech leaders in the UK.

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Sue Daley

Sue Daley is the big data and AI expert at techUK, the trade body for IT vendors.  She is a leading figure in the development of ethics for the digital world.  Her aim is to build a culture of trust and confidence between all the parties providing and handling data.  She began her career in government relations, representing clients to government and parliament.  She was a senior policy advisor at the Confederation of British Industry where she helped run the CBI’s EBusiness Council.  She worked for five years for Symantec, the IT security expert company.   In 2019 she was voted one of the UK’s top 100 experts on big data.  In 2016 she swam the English Channel in just under 24 hours.