MTW Top 50 Tech Leaders

Adam Lindsay, Director of Business Operations, Groupon

As Director of Business Operations, Adam Lindsey is responsible for all operational aspects of the Groupon merchant and customer experience, after initially starting as a first-level CS agent over a decade ago. Adam now has a wealth of global experience in the e-commerce industry, with a user first perspective on every initiative after spending time with Groupon in Manchester, India, Berlin and South Africa. Throughout his time at Groupon, Adam has become known as a driving force for positive change for those around him and the wider business, through collaboration and coordination of diverse teams and strategies.

Alison Hughes, Assistant Director ICT, Digital and Customer, Liverpool City Council

Alison Hughes has built an exceptional network across the public sector, throughout her work over the last 15 years at Bolton and Wigan and more recently Liverpool City Council over the last three years. She has become a trusted advisor to many authorities on driving business change through the use of ICT and digital transformation. A particular project of note was when she headed up a unique relationship on behalf of the Bolton & Wigan Partnership, where they utilise AI, machine learning, chatbots and voice activated devices to tackle the challenges of the council and their 600,000 citizens in the region. Alison has continuously contributed to professional networks for leaders in local public service, sharing her extensive expertise.

Brian Simpson, Product Owner - Chief Technology Office, Lloyd's Bank

Brian Simpson has worked at Lloyds Banking Group for twenty six years, spending more than four of those within the Chief Technology Office. Sharing over two decades of his expertise, Brian has significantly contributed to building the skills capability within Lloyd's engineering and technology communities, creating an environment where digital talent can continuously develop. Brian also organises public events to share the technology stories of the bank with the wider tech community, whilst raising the profile of the Chief Technology Office.

Cheryl Stevens, Director of Shared Channel Experience, DWP Digital

Cheryl Stevens has been a proud civil servant for 20 years, undertaking a variety of leadership and transformation roles. Since April 2020, she has been the Director of Shared Channels Experiences, building a new team in the midst of the first lockdown. The SCE team totals around 500 staff focused on understanding user needs and how best to meet them, a core goal of Cheryl’s across her career. She is a huge advocate for inclusivity within her team, aiming to create a place where you can bring your whole self to work and seeks to bring out the best in every team member. A winner of the 2022 SheInspires ‘Women in STEM’ award for inspiring others, she is a passionate role model across DWP Digital and particularly looks to lift other women up in digital.

Diane Roland, Head of Cloud & Platform, N Brown Group

Diane Roland has worked in the technology function at N Brown Group for over two decades, now working as the Head of Cloud and Platform. Diane is known for her work in making N Brown a modern and agile business, after noting that the organisation had previously been constrained by its legacy e-commerce. Roland oversaw and executed an extremely successful migration to the cloud, which has since seen greater resilience for the business, whilst reducing infrastructure costs. This has since helped drive the growth of the N Brown online business, responding to customer demands at pace.

Gemma Paterson, Head of People Development Experiences & Innovation, Legal & General

As a strategic people, culture and change leader on a mission to 'make work feel more like real life', Gemma Paterson hopes to create an iconic employee experience that empowers people to do their most brilliant work at Legal and General. Throughout the last two decades, Gemma has contributed to cultural change at HSBC, BP and Aviva. In her current role, Paterson is developing a capability strategy, in order to build data, digital, agile & sustainability capabilities throughout the organisation. Gemma's work is known for its impactful contribution in driving performance, acquisition, retention and talent mobility.

Heena Mistry, Chief Digital Officer, United Utilities

Heena Mistry has spent almost 2.5 years at United Utilities as the Chief Digital Officer, with the aim of delivering the company’s ambition to become a “digital utility company”. Mistry is known to be a dynamic senior IT executive and she has successfully implemented complex transformation programmes for global organisations such as Rolls Royce, G4S, Harsco Environmental and Babcock international, in over 40 countries. In her current role, she has a strong reputation for her balanced mix of understanding the importance of customer satisfaction and embracing leading technology to ensure that the service United Utilities deliver goes consistently above and beyond.

Kellie Birmingham, Head of Technology and Data Strategy, The Royal British Legion

Kellie Birmingham is the Head of Technology and Data Strategy at the Royal British Legion, where she has worked for almost three years. Kellie is known for her exceptional leadership and extensive expertise on tactical and strategic programmes and complex transitions over the last decade. She is leading the Royal British Legion's Strategic IT Business Partners and IT Project Managers providing the golden thread between organisational strategy and technology enabled transformation for the charity.

Lorna Allen, Chief Digital & Information Officer, Northern Care Alliance NHS Foundation Trust

Lorna Allen is Chief Digital and Information Officer at Northern Care Alliance NHS Foundation Trust. Allen is a senior IT Leader with over 20 years’ experience across a wide range of business sectors including financial services, legal, telecommunications, oil & gas and heavy industries. Lorna has been recognised for her important and meaningful contribution to the IT team at Stepchange Charity for over three years, providing free digital debt services to over six million people a year. She is now working within the public sector, with aims to drive a culture of change and digitisation, and digital literacy initiatives.

Mari Thornman, Head of EU & UK IT Architecture - Commercial Banking, HSBC

Mari Thorman is the Head of EU and UK IT Architecture, for Commercial Banking at HSBC. Thorman manages a team of architects in UK, Germany, France and EU, whilst also founding a working group to establish best practice and business benefit realisation for API-led Architecture across CMB globally. In addition to her more technical role, Mari is the Co-Chair of the Mindful Workplace Community, which provides resources and support to colleagues who would like to learn more about or gain help with mindfulness practices. There are now over 2500 members of the community, providing a safe space for colleagues throughout the business; as part of this Mari has represented HSBC on the Government backed Mindful Nation sub group.

Mick Ebsworth, Director of Information Security, Co-Op

Mick Ebsworth is the Director of Information Security, at the Co-Op, after previously leading Infosec teams at Costa Coffee, The Post Office, Capgemini and AXA. With well over 25 years of experience in Information Security Management, Governance and Risk, Mick has proven he is highly skilled at defining security operating models, managing risks within appetite, and security acting as an enabler for business success and growth.

Mo Tagari, Chief Technology Officer, AJ Bell

With over 20 years experience in the finance sector, in 2019 Mo Tagari took the role of Chief Technology Officer at AJ Bell. He has worked to grow the team and continue expanding, leveraging the huge opportunity within AJ Bell for innovation. Seeing failure as simply an opportunity to learn, Mo is passionate about trying out new ideas and remaining nimble. He believes in collaboration, not consensus, welcoming ideas from across teams and functions.

Nick Latocha, Global Lead, Data & Analytics, Brambles

Nick Latocha has a long and varied career in the data space, currently taking the lead on Global Data & Analytics at Brambles. Aiming to stay at the forefront of the data revolution, he is passionate about combining the best talent with the best technologies to deliver commercial value through data products. A believer in the value of diverse teams, he looks to nurture talent from different backgrounds and experiences, encouraging them to challenge the status quo. As a mentor, speaker and podcast co-host for The Data Pubcast, he tries to give back to the data and analytics community regularly.

Rachel Anne Jones, Chief Information Officer, HMRC

Rachel Anne Jones is the Chief Information Officer at HMRC, where she has worked for over four years in the role. Rachel has overseen and executed numerous projects for the government department which have transformed the data and technology function for employees and users alike. Rachel is a fierce advocate for increasing the number of women in tech leadership roles, often speaking publicly about the challenges and barriers she has faced within her own career and how organisations can take tangible action to increase representation within the technology industry.

Rob Black, Technology Director, Beauty Bay

Rob Black is a technology leader with over 20 years’ experience across the travel and retail sector. With a strong history of developing and delivering IT strategy transformation at both speed and scale, he joined Beauty Bay in 2021 becoming the Technology Director in 2022. Rob is passionate about team culture, focusing his team around an important question: What do they want to be known for across the company? A strong believer in being a trusted partner to the business, his team looks to actively embrace new technology and deliver a competitive advantage. He also nurtures an environment of collaboration, with a zero-blame culture encouraging everyone to drive towards a common goal and live by the team values.

Amelia Bampton, Managing Consultant, Infinity Works

After senior roles at Codurance, Thoughtworks and Vodafone, Amelia Bampton joined Infinity Works, part of Accenture, as a Managing Consultant in 2022. Amelia is a passionate advocate for driving greater inclusion, accessibility and diversity in technology, with a particular focus on helping break down barriers to entry in the industry. When she’s not collaborating in the office, she can be found hosting the C2 Coffee & Collaboration hot-desk club or bringing people together monthly on Thursdays for her professional book club.

Annette Joseph MBE, Founder & CEO, Diverse & Equal

Annette Joseph is an award-winning Agile Coach and Founder of Diverse & Equal. She strives to improve innovation in tech by increasing the number of talented Black people and people of colour in the industry. Through taster sessions, bootcamps and skill-building, Annette equips adults from under-represented groups with the skills needed to thrive in their careers in tech. She is also the lead behind research and initiatives aiming to empower organisations to create inclusive environments to realise the full business benefits of diversity.

Ben Higgin, Head of Technology & Investments, PwC

After starting his career in audit, Ben Higgin has spent 15 years at PwC becoming the Head of Technology & Investments. With a passion for bridging the digital skills gap, Ben creates a culture of inclusivity and openness to tech. His work is helping PwC and their clients to thrive in the face of rapid technological change, enabling them to be human-led and tech-powered. Ben is also an active advocate for mental health, having supported the Samaritans for many years as a listening volunteer.

Jenny Radcliffe, Author, The People Hacker

Jenny Radcliffe is a burglar for hire, a professional con artist and an educator in the social engineering space. Between her recent best selling book, The People Hacker, the podcast of the same name, and the newly announced TV series, Jenny makes the dark underbelly of cyber criminals accessible to the masses. Her thought leadership aims to help prevent people from becoming victims of malicious social engineering and guard them against cyber attacks in their personal and professional lives.

Lou Cordwell OBE, Chair, GM Local Enterprise Partnership

Lou Cordwell is the founder of digital design studio magneticNorth (mN). In 2021, a partnership with Fluxx, birthed Magnetic, an innovation powerhouse where Lou is Chief Creative Officer. She is an active participant in the wider tech ecosystem, as the Chair of the GM Local Enterprise Partnership, leading on communications, digital broadcasting and the skills fund. Lou is also a passionate campaigner for gender equality in business and tech, and a founding investor in AllBright.

Adam Thomason, CloudOps Manager, Beauty Bay

As the CloudOps Manager for Beauty Bay, Adam Thomason sets out the vision and direction for cloud infrastructure. Adam is currently leading a project to combine metrics, alerts and observability to a single source of truth within New Relic from applications, infrastructure and on-prem workloads. He has been instrumental in the DevOps journey at Beauty Bay, whether that is challenging established processes, encouraging the adoption of agile approaches or always being ready to pivot plans.

Clare Cassidy, Lead Architect, NHS England

With a career spanning over 30 years, Clare Cassidy currently brings her deep technical expertise to NHS England as their Lead Architect. Clare is leading a regional team behind the delivery of IT transformation across Share2Care, designing a digital cloud platform for a population of 4.2 million citizens. Adept at combining business and technical requirements, she is working to enhance citizen care and experience. Outside of work, she can be found running courses for Power Boat and Jet Biking.

Heather Driscoll, Lead Architect, DWP Digital

As a Lead Architect, Heather Driscoll has led the charge to support the wider transformation of DWP’s services by exposing the rich dataset held in legacy services. Known for empowering her team, she has delivered an impressive proof of concept project to build an API capability for legacy applications. Thanks to Heather’s foresight, drive and willingness to experiment, claimants are already seeing benefits with a real-time API in place already for Motability claimants supporting disabled people.

Lianne Potter, Head of SecOps, Asda

Lianne Potter is currently Head of SecOps for the largest greenfield technology transformation project in Europe, taking place at Asda. Building an edge security team from scratch, she is working to bring together best practices with cutting-edge innovations. She is passionate about leveraging her experience as a cyber-anthropologist to combine the human with the technical, creating better security cultures. Lianne also acts as a Board Member for Women in Leeds Digital helping encourage women and diverse groups to consider digital roles.

Richard Moore, Head of IT Strategy & Architecture, AJ Bell

Richard Moore is the Head of IT Strategy and Architecture at AJ Bell, where he has worked his way up through the technology team for over 15 years. Richard is responsible for leading Architecture, Platform Engineering, Data Streaming, Application Security and Agile Practices at AJ Bell, where he collaborates with the CTO and technology leadership team in this role to set and execute the company's technology vision. Richard has recently led a large project to de-couple AJ Bell product applications from back-office systems using Streaming ETL, and Integration Data Hub approaches, to increase the pace of delivery and improve business resilience.