Vodafone IT chief is CIOs' CIO

Vodafone CIO Paul Wybrow has been voted the top private sector CIO in a poll of IT chiefs from FTSE 100 firms and IT suppliers.

Wybrow came top of the poll with 18 per cent of the vote, followed by last year's winner Colin Cobain, IT director at Tesco, on 15 per cent and Al-Noor Ramji, CIO at BT, with 10 per cent.

Others who made it into the top 10 included JP Rangaswami, who has just changed roles from global CIO to head of alternative market products at investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, and Neil Cameron, CIO at Unilever.

In the public sector, new UK government CIO John Suffolk was voted top CIO with 29 per cent of the vote, followed by Richard Granger, NHS director general of IT, with 21 per cent.

The BBC was voted the most admired IT department in the survey, despite having outsourced its technology operations to Siemens Business Services in a £2bn deal in 2004. Tesco's and Vodafone's IT departments came in joint second, with Amazon.com, BSkyB and O2 among the other top-rated IT departments.

Over two-thirds (68 per cent) of respondents said they believe the power of today's CIO is being eroded by more cost-conscious and conservative executive teams.

The survey results also found that most CIOs (82 per cent) stay in their jobs for less than three years, with half having been at their current company for less than 18 months. Only five per cent have been with their current employer for over five years.

All but two of the CIOs at the UK's top 40 companies are male and over a third of respondents (37 per cent) said this is a result of a "boys' club mentality at C-level", although 13 per cent said they believed it was due to the fact the right people for the jobs happened to be male.

The survey of 114 CIOs was conducted during June by Influencer50 for systems integrator 7irene.