Computing Awards: IT Leader of the Year shortlist

The VNUNET.com shortlist is out, for IT Leader of the Year, and among it are many familiar names and organisations:

• Mark Akass from BT Global Financial Services;
• John Crane from National Australia Group Europe;
• Richard Cross from ITV;
• Rorie Devine from Betfair;
• my old colleague Benoit Laclau from EDF Energy;
• Gareth Nutt from Mouchel Parkman (I’ll have to look this up!);
• very unsurprisingly Al-Noor Ramji from BT;
• and Darrell Stein from Marks & Spencer.

Congratulations to all, and I’m sure you’ll now be expecting my call, as well as every other product and service vendor in the Kingdom.

I was intrigued by the synopsis paragraphs…each one incorporated a suggestion that the candidate had implemented a strategy and achieved results.  It implied, though without support, that the stategies were brilliant, and the results outstanding.

I found this curious, because this is a leadership award, and in only one case did the synopsis paragraphs discuss leadership behaviours – that of Rorie Devine – who runs ‘fortnightly “talkback” sessions to encourage feedback from engineers, and sends out a weekly email called “Rorie’s Ramblings” to share the ups and downs of a week as a CTO.’

Perhaps all the other candidates do these things too, and it’s VNUNET.com’s technical bias that is showing, but I’m pretty sure none of the brilliant strategies were fashioned, nor the outstanding results achieved, without the support of extensive project teams.  So why not talk about project leadership behaviours when you’re talking about IT leadership?

— Philip Greenwood

Tags: VNUNET, IT, Leadership, Shortlist