Agenda Setters 2007

In the past, few figures from user organisations have secured an Agenda Setter ranking. This year we have five in the top 30. Andy McCue looks at the emergence of powerful technology directors with international clout.

The CIO or IT director is probably one of the most maligned of the boardroom C-level executives. The pay's not bad - usually - but praise when everything works is rare and the CIO often ends up as the scapegoat when things go wrong, and then there's the constant battle against ever-shrinking tech budgets.

That view has been reflected in the seven years of Agenda Setters, with no CIO ever featuring in the annual top 50 list - until this year that is.

Whether it's the increasing importance of the CIO role in modern business or acknowledgement of their contribution in innovating and driving value through the exploitation of technology, the Agenda Setters judging panel included not one but five representatives of user organisations in the Top 50 this year.

Nowhere is the importance of technology to a business more apparent than at one of the UK's fastest-growing companies, Betfair, whose CEO David Yu and CTO Rorie Devine both appear on the Agenda Setters list at 18 and 26 respectively.

Betfair's phenomenal growth over the past five years is based on cutting the middleman out of the betting and gaming equation using a vast electronic exchange that allows punters to take and place bets directly with each other.

The platform behind this is one of the fastest and most resilient on the internet today, processing more than five million transactions per day and more than 300 bets every second, and the Agenda Setters judging panel acknowledged Betfair for building what is essentially a trading system to rival, if not better, those in the City.

One panellist said: "It is a trading system that has far bigger capacity and far bigger pressures on reliability probably than the one in the City. Betfair is a superb example of a company that in a single day handles more transactions than the total equity of the trading centres of Europe, London, Frankfurt."

Yu's inclusion on the list is for being the tech guy - he was formerly CTO at Betfair - who has defied City sceptics since taking over the top job to continue the company's impressive growth both internationally and in the range of products it offers to punters.

The airline industry gets two CIOs on the Agenda Setters Top 50 list this year, both for very different reasons.

British Airways Paul Coby is the highest ranked CIO on the list at 11 and is described by the Agenda Setters panel as the "gold standard of what a CIO should be".

Coby has driven down IT costs by almost half at BA over the past five years, as well as driving new innovations such as online check-in, print-your-own boarding passes and a new ba.com website.

Coby continues to adhere to his mantra of there being "no IT projects, only business projects" and is currently overseeing the tech infrastructure behind the new Terminal 5 at London's Heathrow Airport and introducing lean manufacturing principles adopted by the likes of Toyota into IT development.

The other airline CIO, at 25 on the list, is Bill Maguire at Virgin America, the Branson-backed US domestic low-cost airline start-up, which made its maiden customer flights this summer.

Maguire's achievement since joining the airline at the beginning of 2006 has been to build the IT infrastructure for Virgin America from scratch in just 18 months, with tight cost constraints and just 20 people in his IT department.

As well as using tried and tested methods such as outsourcing, Maguire has also capitalised on open source, with almost half the airline's applications running on Red Hat Linux.

Agenda Setters panellist Richard Sykes, consultant and silicon.com editorial board member, said Maguire is the first of a new generation of CIOs in the airline industry who have gone totally virtual from the start. "He has put together a complete airline infrastructure totally differently from the way traditional airlines have done," said Sykes.

"It's open source, porting services, totally structured with a very, very small team, so the IT costs are well below the percentage of operational costs of any other competing airline. He's got something that is very flexible and fast-moving."

Also making it onto the Agenda Setters list, at 48, is JP Rangaswami, CIO at BT Global Services, described as a "guru" by one panellist.

A deep thinker - as readers of his Confused of Calcutta blog will testify - from a journalistic and then investment banking background, Rangaswami adopts emerging and disruptive technologies and their ability to transform the way individuals and companies communicate and collaborate.