Name: Bruno Laquet

Title: CIO

Company: Corus

France-born Bruno Laquet joined the world's second-largest steel manufacturer Corus in 2004 and has responsibility for an annual IT budget of £130m and a global IT department of more than 1,000 staff.

Laquet was brought in to Corus to sort out the fragmented IT operation inherited from the merger of the former British Steel and Hoogovens of the Netherlands and has since standardised the IT environment, moving from more than 1,500 applications to a standard set of just 279.

Other achievements at Corus include a major SAP programme across HR, finance, procurement and engineering, and implementing a multi-sourcing strategy that generates 30 per cent savings per year.

Laquet has a huge amount of experience in the IT industry and started out at France Telecom in 1974 where he spent six years as a project leader. He was later European IT director at ST Microelectronics in Switzerland for 11 years and spent six years at Motorola in France, Switzerland and the US before joining aluminium manufacturer Pechiney (later bought by Alcan) as CIO.

Laquet has a Master's in IT qualification from the École Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications in Paris.