Name: JP Rangaswami

Title: CIO

Company: BT Global Services

What they say about him: "A CIO 'paratrooper' who took on the transformation of values in investment banking."

JP Rangaswami started out his career as a financial journalist in his home city of Calcutta after completing a degree in economics and statistics. He moved to the UK in 1987 and after failing to get an NUJ card he joined Burroughs (now Unisys) writing manuals and running training courses for their banking products.

That step from journalism into IT led him on to Data General, where he gained mainframe, development and marketing experience before setting up his own offshore services company. He then joined investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort in 1997 as a Y2K consultant, eventually rising to become its CIO in 2001. Last year he joined BT Global Services as CIO.

Rangaswami is passionate about education, information sharing and collaboration, and using innovative and disruptive technologies to break down the traditional 'silos' that lock it all in. He's also a big open source advocate and a keen blogger on his own Confused of Calcutta site.

A self-confessed "child of the Empire" - Rangaswami grew up playing billiards, bridge, golf and doing The Times crossword - he is an avid reader with more than 27,000 books in his home library. A huge cricket fan, Rangaswami also specialises in trying to set "un-Googleable" questions about the sport that can't be answered doing a quick Google search.

Rangaswami says he is a "retarded hippie" at heart, listening to the music of the Grateful Dead, Joni Mitchell and The Who.