The role of the sponsor in a major business transformation is vital and as this episode of the Horizon CIO Podcast reveals, not always well understood or specified by the business.  To get some insight into the role of the sponsor HR transformation specialists Joe Ales and Jason West of Underscore Group described how they help organisations get the most from sponsorship.  “Sponsors are the most critical role in a business transformation, they define what the transformation is going to achieve and what the end state will look like,” says Ales on the podcast for business technology leaders. Chal ..read more

Ratings agencies are a fact of life for the financial community and as cyber security rises in importance, so too must the security of an organisation be rated. Security rating platforms is a rapidly growing area of the security technology market.  “Ratings give you the ability to tell a story that is not just about firewalls. There has been an evolution of the way that we present to the CEO and the board,” “A security rating is a measurement of the cyber security performance carried out by an independent agency,” says Jake Olcott, VP of BitSight a security ratings provider. Adding that they ..read more

Wellcome Trust chief technology officer (CTO) James Thomas told a Horizon CIO Network roundtable how his organisation has built a new operation with data and change at its heart.  Talking to CIO and CTO peers from FTSE 100 organisations Thomas gives a frank insight into how to deliver change and reveals how he created a new culture and set of measurements to benefit the organisation and its technologists.  The Wellcome Trust is headquartered in central London, but owes its philanthropic heritage to an American, Sir Henry Welcome who moved to the UK in 1880 to set up a pharmacy business, one wh ..read more

The first Horizon CIO Network roundtable event of 2019 focused on how organisations can implement artificial intelligence (AI). CIOs from major financial services, medical, retail, education, manufacturing and housing joined the debate. Keynote for the event was Alistair Maughan, who has been a partner with leading law firm Morison Foerster LLP since 2004 and at the forefront of technology law throughout his career. Maughan told a room full of CIOs about ethical and legal implications of AI. “For almost 30 years now I've seen successive waves of technology evolution breaking on the shore fro ..read more

The media industry has been highly disrupted by the internet and the move by consumers to digital media. This has led to major changes in the business models of media organisations. For the March Horizon CIO Podcast, three leading media business technology leaders came together to debate the impact, but more importantly the opportunity, for technology to change the shape of the media. CIOs from three unique media types joined CIO Community Editor Mark Chillingworth to describe how their sector is changing in shape. Chris Fosberry represented the subscription critical business data sector as C ..read more

A quarter of major business technology leadership hires in 2018 were for a CTO role. 2018 saw a small decrease in role changes amongst the UK’s CIOs and CTOs. Speaking to major search providers, they too are seeing an increase in demand for CTOs and at both ends of the country. Financial services was one of the most active sectors throughout 2018, perhaps indicative of the rising awareness that technology led challengers are fast encroaching on their business models. Early in the year Duncan Gray moved from automotive auctioneers BCA to Premium Credit, a provider of specialist loans and Jame ..read more

The Horizon CIO Podcast is brought to you in partnership with Future Processing: To discover what to include in your RFI, download How to write an RFI for outsourced IT Projects from Future Processing at: www.startnearshoring.com/rfi “It’s hot on the exoplanet Wasp 107 Bravo, 500 degrees celsius and that is very important. A team of experts from the University of Exeter has detected helium in the atmosphere of this exoplanet, they used the Hubble space telescope to analyse light passing through it and they have discovered helium by looking at the data and analysing it,” says Alan Hill, Chief ..read more

As bank TSB knows all too well, how people perceive your brand is based on their technology experience. In the highly competitive world of online book retailing this is especially the case because of the dominant position of Amazon, which of course has transformed not only the retail of novels, but every shopping story you can name. Despite the scale and success of Amazon, here in the UK a technology driven service, developed by a UK development house demonstrates that a good technology consumer experience allows organisations to flourish alongside a US giant like Amazon. World of Books was f ..read more

For the second year in a row insurance business RSA Group has announced good results. During 2017 RSA Group, which in the UK is better known for its More Than general insurance (GI) brand, recorded profits of £322 million after tax, up from £20 million in 2016. The good results of 2016 prompted CEO Stephen Hester to state that the international insurance business was out of recovery. In late 2016 David Germain joined RSA Group as CTO working alongside stalwart RSA business leader Darren Price and a year later became Group Chief Information & Technology Officer. Germain invited the Horizon ..read more

In the spring of 2018 enterprise resource planning (ERP) software giant SAP announced that from 2025 its ERP software will be built to operate with just one database platform, its own SAP HANA database.   Between now and 2025 SAP will continue to support ERPs using Oracle, SQL, IBM or a myriad of other database formats, but beyond 2025 it will no longer support ERP applications not using the HANA database.  Discussion on CIO forums that the Horizon CIO Podcast is a member of displayed a fear amongst business technology leaders that SAP is imposing a restriction on agility and technology spend ..read more