Name: Gordon Lovell-Read

Title: CIO and director of corporate business technology

Company: Siemens

Gordon Lovell-Read was snapped up by conglomerate Siemens in 2002 after impressing the company's CFO on an IT project he was working on for them while at previous employer HP. He became CIO and the only member of the executive management board to have been appointed from outside the company.

Since then Lovell-Read has rebuilt trust in the IT function and aligned it more closely with the rest of the business, deploying a single SAP platform, moving to a common set of business processes, centralising and outsourcing the IT infrastructure and offshoring the enterprise data centres.

Lovell-Read re-branded the IT department as corporate business technology in 2006 and was promoted to director of that function.

Although he started out his career at ICL in software engineering, Lovell-Read has risen to the role of CIO without going through the traditional IT route. He is a 30-year veteran of the IT industry working with blue-chip organisations - 17 of those spent at HP where he held a number of senior management posts and became director of business consulting.

That background has given him a rare mix of leadership capabilities and a proven track record in strategy, business transformation, change management, sales, marketing, consulting, project management and business development.

A current area of interest for Lovell-Read is 'green' IT and in addition to his day job he is in the process of pulling together other UK CIOs for a UK academy for carbon reduction in IT deployment, called CredIT.