Name: Peter Dew

Title: CIO

Company: The Linde Group

What they say about him: "Gets a buzz from 'not knowing', invests in his people and is a great sponsor of personal and professional development."

The well-travelled Peter Dew became CIO of Germany-based Linde Group after it acquired UK industrial gases company BOC for £8.2bn last year.

Dew was CIO at BOC at the time of the merger and has spent his entire career at the company after starting out as a systems development manager in one of its subsidiary businesses in South Africa. That opportunity came via a management training programme at Plessy.

He then spent six years with BOC in Australia, eventually rising to the position of IT director before being called back to the UK to take up the role of CIO.

The newly merged Linde Group has set aggressive efficiency targets of €250m by the end of 2008. Dew's role as CIO will be to ensure IT plays its part in meeting that goal by moving to a standardised global IT model, including a single global SAP platform.

Dew is also something of a 'future-gazer' around issues such as how increasingly ubiquitous network connectivity will change the whole concept of an 'organisation' and how it operates.