The Home Office CIO speaks to silicon.com's Nick Heath on ID cards, protecting data, and how tech can make a difference

Home Office CIO Annette Vernon is steeling herself for a challenge that will require steady nerves and painstaking precision to avoid getting burned.

Nationwide IT director Peter Stafford talks to silicon.com about business transformation, the importance of the CIO and the joys of working in IT.

The financial sector is facing one of the toughest periods in its history and as IT director of Nationwide, the UK's biggest building society, Peter Stafford has been juggling the demands of significant business transformation with more immediate economic concerns.

From TfL to HMRC, CIO Phil Pavitt talks to silicon.com about the nerves surrounding his new role, cleaning up outsourcing deals, and why he wants to make IT boring

In a matter of months, there will be a new man in charge of taming the tangle of fragmented systems that power the British taxman.

What's in the works at Westminster City Council? Jo Best speaks to the CIO about the latest trends and projects.

After a career in IT and government spanning more than 20 years, Westminster CIO David Wilde doesn't appear to have lost his enthusiasm for the latest IT trends.

David Lister has held senior IT roles at Boots, Reuters and RBS. He talks to Nick Heath about why he left RBS and how he will meet the challenges ahead as group CIO for National Grid.

Wherever David Lister goes, change almost always follows.

"'Computing' really wasn't something I would have wanted to do". Hampshire County Council head of IT talks to silicon.com about where he found the excitement from

"I didn't start out in IT at all but in the 1980s technology was beginning to take off and change how organisations actually worked. At that time organisations were looking for people who were, I guess, numerate and interested in technology to help make that transition."

Carlsberg is revamping its IT. CIO Kenneth Egelund Schmidt talks to Jo Best on why sourcing and collaboration is the right recipe

At Carlsberg IT, something is brewing.

For David Jones, the role of CIO at the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) is something of a departure: for the majority of his career, Jones has been an army officer.

Before joining the CPS 14 months ago, Jones was more used to dealing with the rigours of military life than the rigours of heading up an IT function within the civil service.

People and services are always on the mind of Joe Harley, the CIO of the Department for Work and Pensions.

The DWP deals with 20 million 'customers' per year, paying out in excess of £124bn in benefits annually, and making some 14 million payments per week.

With the average tenure of a CIO in the region of three to four years, Ian Dobb should be something of an anomaly, having headed up IT at Channel 4 for more than 10 years. But at the broadcaster his long tenure is nothing special - the top IT team has been together for nine years, the outgoing Channel 4 CIO told silicon.com.

"It's a great place to work. It's a great brand; everyone knows what it does and what it brings. There was a real buzz around the place and it's a very friendly organisation as well. I don't like politics and [Channel 4] is very much people focused on what they're good at, and getting on with delivering it," he said.

Audit Commission CIO Jeremy Boss hasn't always been a techie. Before taking up his previous role as head of IT at Imperial Tobacco Group, trained accountant Boss was working in risk management at Coopers and Lybrand.

A background combining auditing, accounting and technology is one that serves Boss well in his current role as CIO of the Audit Commission, a position he's held since 2004.

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) started life in the aftermath of the American War of Independence - with the first UK Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs being appointed in 1782. Purpose-built offices came a little later, in 1868, but, as government departments go, the FCO is more imposing edifice than new kid on the block.

Its CIO however is a relative newcomer: Tony Mather has been in the job for just over a year and a half.

How many CIOs can say that their company motto is "having fun"?

That's how Mike Cope sums up life working as IT director at airline Virgin Atlantic.

This week silicon.com sits down with the Naked CIO to find out how to survive the recession, what makes a good CIO and whether his kind are meant for the CEO's office.

silicon.com: How can CIOs weather the recession? Naked CIO: The big question is whether CIOs can survive the storm. Companies are looking at tactical measures to keep the lights on and CIOs are as vulnerable as any resource under this short-term strategy.

Matthew Oakeley is head of group IT at global asset management company Schroders. He joined the company three and a half years ago and in that time has overseen the Book of Record back-office transformation project which was recently named overall winner at the Corporate IT Forum's Real IT Awards.

Oakeley has spent most of his working life in asset management. He started as a junior programmer at Phillips & Drew (now UBS Global Asset Management) and rose to head of investment IT before moving to Schroders in 2005.

"Oh boy, welcome to the tornado."

This is how Martin Frick describes his initiation into the world of retail when he joined car rental firm Avis Europe.

Network Rail's CIO Catherine Doran isn't one to play the role of the victim. "It doesn't suit me," she jokes.

Anyone who has met the feisty Irishwoman can testify to that. She's a bundle of energy and funny - and you can sense the no-nonsense side to her few would be advised to cross.

Bracknell isn't the most glamorous of locations and from the outside, a drab, grey 1970's office tower block fits right in with its surroundings. But housed inside are the buzzing offices of global logistics giant DHL.

In the office of DHL's CIO, Nigel Underwood, the Lincoln City Football Club calendar on the wall gives away his allegiance.

Ian Cramb is one of the increasing number of IT chiefs moving up the corporate ladder into wider operating roles, rising from CIO to become COO of the Citigroup's consumer business in 2006.

It's a huge job, with responsibility for an annual budget of some $2bn and almost 14,000 employees.

After a rollercoaster ride at telco NTL Phil Pavitt was contemplating a more relaxing semi-retirement that involved spending more time at his house in France, flying helicopters and playing golf.

At least, even for a self-confessed work junkie like Pavitt, that was the plan until the headhunters came knocking about the CIO role at Transport for London (TfL).

Martin Taylor is a true CIO big hitter who has moved effortlessly across industry sectors turning around and revitalising failing IT functions.

But it's not just IT departments that Taylor has made a habit of saving. A keen sailor for more than 30 years - although he admits to now getting into motorboats to the "utter disgust" of his sailing buddies - he served for 18 months as a volunteer lifeboat man on the River Thames out of the Chiswick station, pulling people out of the water.

Robin Dargue has long been known as something of a high-flyer in CIO circles - and that's not just about his hobby of flying planes (more of which later). After hitting the heady heights of CIO for drinks giant Diageo aged just 36, he has now taken on what most people would view as a daunting challenge at Royal Mail.

What attracted Dargue to the job? A £2bn technology-based business transformation programme aimed at making the organisation leaner and able to compete better in the de-regulated postal market - essentially it's about saving a somewhat unwieldy 360-year-old organisation against new competition.

Patrolling the mean streets of London on a Friday evening isn't where you would usually find a CIO but then not many CIOs get to experience front line service in the way the Metropolitan Police Service's director of information management Ailsa Beaton does.

Part of her role - in addition to the fairly standard set of CIO responsibilities in terms of the IT systems, voice comms and systems development - includes the application of technology into policing, and where better to get that insight than at the sharp end.

Whether at work or play Claire Hamon, CIO of construction company Rok Group, isn't one to shy away from or shirk a challenge.

On route to the top of her profession she has successfully tackled some massive IT-based change management programmes in both the private and public sector but out of the office she can also be found charging towards the try line or making crunching tackles for her local rugby team.

Being the CIO for a tech vendor can often be something of a double-edged sword.

Sure, you get access to cutting-edge tech and some of the smartest engineers around but the nature of the business means you're often a beta guinea pig for all those new products and, of course, everyone in the company is an IT expert and thinks they can do your job better than you.

Dave Lynch, a no-nonsense northerner hailing from the seaside town of Blackpool, has come a long way since starting out on the trams and buses that parade up and down the Golden Mile promenade - although he still holds a season ticket for the town's tangerine football club.

Lynch - voted one of the UK's top 50 CIOs last year - is now group technology director at Newcastle-based transport company Go Ahead Group, but he began his career more than two decades ago at Blackpool Transport in the early 1980s.

Given the image problems associated with both areas, working in IT in the insurance industry a few years ago would probably have ranked high on the 'careers to avoid' list.

The internet, however, has shaken up the insurance industry where dot-com upstarts like eSure - the one with Michael Winner's "calm down, dearÂ… it's only a commercial" TV adverts - now compete against the established bricks and mortar stalwarts.

It's a time of transition again at the AA. Just four years after a private equity buyout and separation from its then parent company, Centrica, the motoring organisation is putting the finishing touches to a £6.2bn merger with Saga, which has just been given the official green light by competition regulators in Brussels.

That transition is not just for the AA but for the company's IT director Trevor Didcock - shortly after our chat in his office at the AA's Basingstoke headquarters Didcock left the organisation as the Saga management team took control.

Just outside the window of Ian Campbell's desk in the open plan office at British Energy's Gloucester headquarters, a mother duck waddles by with her three chicks. A couple of weeks earlier, one might imagine they would have been floating by but the devastating floodwaters have now receded in this part of the country.

British Energy's facilities weren't actually hit by the floods but it did cause problems for some employees getting to work.

Property management isn't a sector that has traditionally relied on the exploitation of technology, with most of the profits coming from astute land and real estate investments by pinstriped City types.

However that picture of the sector is slowly changing at London-based Capital & Regional, which focuses on property asset management in the retail and leisure sectors.

Health and beauty chain Boots has become one of the most familiar names on UK high streets - a long way from the small herbal remedy shop it started out as under Sir Jesse Boot back in 1871.

More recently the company has been facing fierce competition from the big supermarkets eating into its core toiletries and drugs market but, having bounced back with a £7bn merger with Alliance Unichem last year, the Alliance Boots group is currently the subject of a high-profile £11bn tug-of-war bidding battle between two private equity groups.

CIO jobs don't come much more challenging than at one of Whitehall's biggest central government departments, where staff refer to the work carried out by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) as "the daily miracle".

To put that into context, "the daily miracle" involves making 13 million benefits and pensions payments every day, with a hundred billion pounds flowing through the DWP's systems each year to its 20 million customers.

Despite being the obvious route to the top, a degree from a good university or an MBA isn't always necessary for the IT guy to break into the upper echelons of a FTSE 250 company. This is something United Business Media's (UBM) group CIO Matthew Graham-Hyde can testify to.

We meet in a plush conference room at UBM's offices by Blackfriar's bridge with a glorious vista of the Thames and the skyline of London on a crisp spring morning but it's fair to say Graham-Hyde's career started in somewhat less salubrious surroundings.

Bird flu is on John Suffolk's mind at the moment - nothing to do with his day job in charge of the government's £2bn Criminal Justice IT programme, unsurprisingly, but rather his other life running a rare breed conservation farm with his wife in the Peak District.

Among the rare breeds are about 100 chickens that roam freely outside and Suffolk is worried about how they will cope if they have to be moved indoors in the event of any bird flu prevention restrictions being imposed in the UK. (He's also got a litter of pigs cheekily named after chief executives and royalty.)

Rick Davidson is a very busy man. As global CIO of recruitment and staffing agency Manpower, he spends most of his time on the road and in the air, visiting local operations in each of the 72 countries the company has a presence in.

Right now he's on a brief trip to London to catch up with what's going on in the UK, having just got in from Germany, and later in the day will board a flight back to his Milwaukee base in the US.

The rise of UK-based online betting exchange Betfair is without doubt an astonishing one. Launched five years ago by Andrew Black and Edward Wray, Betfair received bets from just 27 people on its first offering - The Oaks horse race on 9 June 2000.

Now nearly 100,000 people per month use the exchange and Betfair processes some three million transactions per day - matching more than 12,000 bets per minute at peak times. Annual revenues have passed the £100m mark and there is continual speculation about a possible stock market flotation, which would make some of its 500 employees very rich.

BT is an organisation in transition. The move to reinvent itself from an old-fashioned provider of telephone lines to a global IT services company is, says BT CIO Al-Noor Ramji, a transformation "on the scale of IBM" when Big Blue saw the diminishing margins on products and bet the house instead on services.

IT undoubtedly will play a key role in BT's transformation and Ramji is a year into overseeing the 'One IT' programme that aims to consolidate the spaghetti technology sprawl that previously existed at the telco.

It's a little over six months into her role as the Highways Agency's (HA) first ever information director - or the "jam-buster" or "roads tsar" as the tabloids have tagged her - but already Denise Plumpton views the daily drive into her Birmingham office in a completely different light now that she is not simply one of the thousands of drivers trying to beat motorway traffic jams into work.

Instead Plumpton finds herself constantly checking that all the motorway signage is giving out the correct information on queues and delays - and makes sure her colleagues know about it as soon as she gets into work if anything is wrong.

silicon.com chief reporter Andy McCue this week hands over the writing of the McCue Interview to editor Tony Hallett, who talks to an IT chief with a £1bn-plus annual IT budget, a second hat marked 'CTO' and an ambition to one day be a CEO.

It's a sunny, late summer's morning at Vodafone's HQ, these days a modern campus in Newbury, and the mobile operator's hybrid CIO/CTO looks completely at ease, sitting in an unassuming side office not far from dozens in his IT department. During our interview he will turn out to be open and likeable as we talk - yet to many outside the giant network operator he is an enigma.

Unilever CIO Neil Cameron looks admiringly out of the window at the cranes and construction work busily underway on the shell of the global consumer goods manufacturer's opulent headquarters at Blackfriars Bridge in London.

The façade of the 70-year old building is listed and has to be kept intact while the rest of it is demolished and redeveloped over the next two years. Cameron is fascinated by the complex construction project and admits to a keen passion for woodwork that has seen him build his own state-of-the-art workshop and collect all the power tools known to man.