BCS IT Leaders Forum: Executive committee
The executive committee of the forum, its terms of reference, and contact details.
Chair
Jonathan Leeson
Digital and technology leader with 28 years in a multi culture and multinational environment. Experience in digital strategy, technology, sourcing, business transformation and change portfolios at an executive/board level. I’ve recently set-up my own company The GTL (Global Thought Leaders) focusing on Business and Digital Transformation opportunities. I’m currently building a portfolio of non-executive and advisory roles based on prior experience. I’m a Fellow, CITP and CEng/IEng assessor for the BCS Institute of IT and the events lead for IT Leaders Forum. Outside of my profession I’m enjoy competing in sporting events including Triathlons, Cycling and Motorsport.
Immediate Past Chair
Dr David Miller FBCS CITP FIET FCIM CEng DipM
An award winning senior executive who has held CTO, CIO, CMO, CEO and advisory roles principally in large and complex enterprises across many business sectors on four continents including leading a number of global assignments. Full time senior leadership roles included Chair and MD of ITDYNAMICS Ltd for 20 years, and Director roles at CSC and British Rail. Grammar school educated and has attended executive programmes at the London Business School and Oxford University. He was awarded a PhD by Middlesex University, London, in 2013. Author of Managing Agile Business Technology (Springer, 2022), and books on business-focused IT (BCS, 2008 and ITDYNAMICS, 2005). Past Chair of the BCS IT Leaders Forum (2022 & 2023).
Inclusion Officer
Norman King
Norman has 25 years’ experience working in the IT industry. Spending 14 years at Birmingham City University’s – Technology Innovation Centre, engaging with hundreds of small and medium sized enterprises, predominately working with executive teams on a variety of local, regional, national & European funded Technology Transfer projects in the Jewellery, Manufacturing, Automotive and Light Engineering sectors. Facilitating bespoke initiatives including Enterprise Architecture, Database systems & Business Process Mapping for ERP systems implementations. In tandem with his commercial activities, university responsibilities included positions as a Senior Lecturer, Consultant Lecturer and Assistant Centre Manager. Norman is currently Head of Computing at a high performing Grammar School in Birmingham and has been a member of the BCS for 18 years.
Voluntary and community services are equally important to Norman, with 10+ years’ experience as a mentor in numerous professional settings including working with young offenders (West Midlands Probation Service) to mentoring new BCS members in the embryonic stages of their career.
Norman hopes for greater diversity and inclusivity within the technology sector, which will result in an even better future world of technology.
Early Careers Advocate
Matthew Taylor FBCS CISSP CCSP
Matthew is a technology transformation leader at one of the Big Four. He previously led large-scale complex global IT transformation, delivery and recoveries for over 20 years at Accenture. He has also taught at Accenture's training facility in Chicago and was an elite quality assurance lead on global delivery, solutioning, best practice and governance.
Privileged to lead, coach and mentor large international teams and work in Europe, US and India, Matthew has experienced an incredibly valuable range of cultures and working environments with some great clients across industries and government. He is a technologist at heart, who enjoys constantly learning and hearing new perspectives.
Committee members
Somayeh Aghnia
A technology strategist with a strong software delivery heritage, Somayeh thrives on creating harmony between technology and humans in business and life.
Somayeh has co-funded Geeks Ltd, a technology consultancy, WordUp App Ltd, a Language learning app, and London School of Innovation, the UK's first technology specialised higher education organisation.
She is also a strong advocate of more girls in technology and on the board with a focus on "Real Models".
Somayeh has won multiple awards for innovation, entrepreneurship, and business partnerships and is a BCS Fellow.
Ian Golding
Ian has been a Chief Information Officer, Chief Technical Officer and Data Privacy Officer, leading global commercial technology programmes for over 20 years. He is currently Group CIO of Anthesis Group, the world's largest group of dedicated sustainability professionals, and previously Interim CIO at the Natural History Museum. At the NHM he led the organisation's Technology Strategy and Vision to support its dual role as a centre of excellence in leading scientific research and a world-leading museum. He has also worked in interim leadership roles at SThree Plc, the RNLI and Southern Housing Group.
Ian has a passion for fostering collaboration and innovation to exploit the benefits of technology and data in permanent, interim, fractional and private consulting roles. he is a Fellow of The Institute of Directors, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a Fellow of the IET and a Chartered Professional Fellow of The BCS. He is also an investor who mentors digital startups. By devoting time to helping emerging businesses, his aim is to help grow the digital ecosystem.
Panagiota Karadimitriou
IT specialist with over 20 years of professional experience in multicultural environments. Proficient in the field of enterprise analysis, analysis of business structure and processes, design, planning, and implementation for the successful development and execution of IT strategy.
Highly qualified in infrastructure architecture as it regards the technology infrastructure of an enterprise, and addressing issues of performance and resilience.
Proficient also in designing and building large-scale information systems with expertise in J2EE and SOA technologies.
She is also a Member of the Law and Enterprise Architecture Specialist Groups.
Gill Ringland
Secretary & Treasurer
Gill’s early career included the Universities of Bristol, Edinburgh, Newcastle, and research at the University of California at Berkeley and Oxford. She did pioneering work in IT on systems and data architecture, at CAP, Inmos and Modcomp. She has been active in seven start-ups and was responsible for building a £3bn new business over four years for computer firm ICL. She wrote the book “Scenario Planning” based on her strategy role at ICL.
She was CEO, Director and a Fellow of SAMI Consulting (Strategy with a view of the future) from 2002 to 2017, with clients in the public, private and NGO sector from Mexico to Malaysia, including the European Commission. She became an Emeritus Fellow in 2017. From 2017 to 2021 she was a Director of Ethical Reading, established to create a community of organisations in the Reading area who do the right thing by each other, the wider community and the environment, and thrive in the process. From 2021 to 2025 she was a Trustee of the u3a Newbury.
Since 2022 she has been working with the ITLF on improving visibility of the threat to the economy and society from digital system failure. She co-chaired the Service Resilience Working Group with Professor Ed Steinmueller. Phase One resulted in two major publications: Software Risk and Resilience and NPC BCS Software Risk - The Elephant in the Room (nationalpreparednesscommission.uk). Phase II of the work covered Policy, Operational Resilience, research on complex tightly coupled systems; and working with intermediaries such as Universities, insurance companies. The report from a Round Table with the Business Continuity Institute and the National Preparedness Commission is available here
The book taking the Working Group’s findings to a wider audience is Resilience of Services: reducing the impact of IT failures, written with Ed Steinmueller, published by London Publishing Partnerships.
She has B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees, is a Life Fellow of the British Computer Society, an ICL Fellow Emeritus and a Fellow of the World Academy of Art & Science. She is a graduate of Stanford University's Senior Executive Program; and a Liveryman of the City of London. She was co-opted to the UK Science Research Council’s Computing Science Committee, the UK Economic and Social Research Council, and to three European Commission High Level Expert Groups on Foresight.
She has over 100 publications: her books on Scenario Planning and strategy are used at Business Schools including Harvard. Her 12th book, this one with Patricia Lustig, is The Possibility Wheel: Making better choices in a fractured world, published by Triarchy Press. She publishes regularly on the Long Finance blog, and gives webinars, on Foresight and IT topics.
Haiyan Wu
Vice Chair & Communication and Events
Haiyan’s day job is as a Research Manager at UCL, in the Bartlett School of Energy, Environment and Resources, with interests in energy and health.
She is a Committee Member of the OU Industrial Advisory Board, of the Communications Management Association, and has served as Vice-Chair of BCS Council.
Kevin Eagles
I started working in IT, progressed to network engineering and supporting communications systems, and was drawn to Cyber. I am passionate about Cyber Security and have over 20 years’ experience in this field; the last 10 years in leadership roles (CISO). I have led public sector and private sector secure deliveries, and Cyber transformation programmes. I am experienced across Projects, Programmes and In-Life Service Management. Experience has taught me communication is key to our goals.
Wael Elrifai
International Liaison
Wael Elrifai is a technology leader with extensive experience in artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT). He serves as Chief Technology Officer of a medical technology startup, and holds an Associate Fellowship at the University of Oxford, where he lectures on the engineering and mathematical foundations of AI. Elrifai has founded several startups, is a Fellow of the British Computer Society and has co-authored “The Future of IoT: Leveraging the Shift to a Data-Centric World,” a text exploring the convergence of IoT and AI. He has also contributed to the field as the former Treasurer of the Alliance for IoT Innovation. In addition to his executive roles, Elrifai serves as a Non-Executive Director for multiple startups, guiding them through the evolving technological landscape. His insights have been featured in publications such as BBC News, Wired Magazine, Forbes, and The Financial Times.
Sarah Greasley
Accomplished former CTO in the Technology (Amazon Web Services / IBM) and Insurance (Direct Line Group) sectors now pursuing a portfolio career focussed on non-executive appointments and board advisory roles.
Deep expertise in AI, blockchain and other emerging technologies, innovation, strategy and large scale digital transformation, as well as proven track record in the leadership and delivery of large scale complex programmes in financial services and insurance.
Senior executive technical roles include Director, Solution Architecture, EMEA, at Amazon Web Services, a core member of the EMEA SLT, working with customers and partners, leading technology teams across EMEA, driving AI and sustainability initiatives and engaging at board level with customers on driving value from technology.
Previously Chief Technology Officer at Direct Line Group, taking responsibility for their technology strategy and delivering new cloud based architectures. Prior to that, had a number of roles at IBM, working with financial services customers as CTO and Technical Director. Appointed an IBM Distinguished Engineer in 2011. She is as Fellow of the BCS.
Mengqiu Cao
Dr Mengqiu Cao is a Lecturer in Transport and Urban Systems Modelling (Urban Systems Predictive Analytics and Machine Learning) at the Bartlett School of Environment, Energy and Resources (BSEER), University College London (UCL). He is the Ethics Lead at the UCL Energy Institute. He works in both academia and industry, specialising in an interdisciplinary research field, which is primarily a mixture of transport analysis and urban studies.
In addition, he has also worked with public authorities and international funding organisations. He has served as the UK Ambassador for the Association of European Transport. He is a Fellow of: the Royal Geographical Society (RGS), the Royal Statistical Society (RSS), the Royal Society of Arts (RSA), the Higher Education Academy (HEA), and a Member of: the BCS: The Chartered Institute of IT; Royal Economic Society (RES), the Chartered Institution of Highways and Transportation (CIHT), the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport (CILT), the Transport Planning Society (TPS), the British Computer Society - the Chartered Institute for IT (BCS), the Town and Country Planning Association (TCPA) and the Regional Studies Association (RSA).
Dileep Rai
Dileep Rai is a result-driven professional with 15 plus years of experience in designing, developing, implementing, and supporting the Oracle cloud ERP Supply chain solutions for various industries. I have deep-dived into pain points and quickly pivoted with innovative solutions to result in more streamlined and SCM-friendly processes.
Knowledge and Experience in the entire product life cycle, from initial concept through design, build, and support of the end-user. A recent publication is How AI is Transforming Supply Chains: Applications, Benefits, and Performance Metrics.
The committee's terms of reference
The BCS IT Leaders Forum ToR should be read in conjunction with the BCS Member Group rules.
Contact us
To contact a member of the committee, please email itleaderscommittee@bcs.org.uk referencing their name/title at BCS IT Leaders Forum.
