ITLF Conference - The Changing Demands on IT Leaders

Explore the evolving roles in IT leadership, featuring key discussions on leaderpreneurs, collaboration, AI, and resilience.

Speakers

Shakeeb Niazi

Gill Ringland

Matt Sharp

Rebecca Salsbury

Chairs

Somayeh Aghnia

Ed Steinmueller

Agenda

14:00 - Welcome and Outline of the event – Chairs

Somayeh Aghnia

Ed Steinmueller

14:05 - Introduction to BCS ITFL, Jonathan Leeson
14:10 - Poll

14:15 - Why Leaderpreneurs are needed – Shakeeb Niazi

• Can IT Leaders do more to drive business innovation and growth?
• Do IT Leaders have the experience of driving business-changing innovation?
• What are the key strategies an IT Leader should adopt to drive business-changing innovation?

14:30 - Why Service Resilience now - Gill Ringland

• Service outages affect many and increasing numbers of people, affecting UK well-being and productivity
• The impact is rarely measured – frameworks exist for measuring impact eg user hours lost, and digital assets compromised
• IT Leaders focus changes from software development to systems thinking about keeping the lights on – maintaining services to customers

14:45 - Q & A with panel

15:15 - Break

15:30 - Insourcing and outsourcing – Matt Sharp

• Is outsourcing vs insourcing still a relevant conversation in an “as a service” world?
• Shaping a sourcing model that is right for your organisation
• Considerations of outsourcing on skills and development pathways

15:45 - Implementing universal access to AI technology for employees - Rebecca Salsbury

• Deciding when to jump on the bandwagon (adoption curve vs the organisation)
• How (not) to plan an onboarding and adoption approach
• What to do next: evaluating value

16:00 - Q & A with panel

16:30 - Key questions for IT Leaders – Chairs

Somayeh Aghnia

Ed Steinmueller

16:45 - Poll

17:00 - Close

About speakers

Shakeeb Niazi

IT Strategist, Consultant and Mentor, Providing Leadership in Entrepreneurship & Mentorship

An experienced business leader, with over 40 years of delivering business transformation within emerging digital technologies, whilst employing a rigorous business process. Shakeeb’s passion is the intersection of technology, innovation, and entrepreneurship.
Shakeeb judges for IET and BCS on categories such as Future Unicorns, Technology Excellence, Sustainability, and NetZero.
He chairs the BCS Entrepreneurs group and was on the IT Leaders Forum and now chairs the IT Leaderpreneur initiative.

Gill Ringland

FBCS; Emeritus Fellow SAMI Consulting, ICL Fellow; FWAAS

Gill has had a distinguished career spanning academia, IT systems and data architecture, and strategic consulting. Her early work took her from the Universities of Bristol, Edinburgh, and Newcastle to research positions at the University of California at Berkeley and Oxford. She was instrumental in IT advancements at companies like CAP, Inmos, and Modcomp and played a key role in growing a new £3bn business for ICL, where she also authored the book "Scenario Planning." Gill served as CEO and Director at SAMI Consulting from 2002 to 2017, assisting clients worldwide in envisioning future strategies.

She later contributed to Ethical Reading as a Director, promoting ethical business practices. Since 2022, she has focused on highlighting risks of digital system failures with the ITLF, leading to significant publications and ongoing research into system resilience.

Gill holds 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. Her extensive publication record includes over 100 works, and she is currently preparing her tenth book on the use of Foresight in Management.

Matt Sharp

Chief Digital Officer || FBCS CITP || CIC Digital Forum || Computing IT Leaders 100 2023 || UK IT Industry Awards Judge || RLB Pride Ally

Matt is a Chartered Fellow of the BCS and sits as the representative of the Chartered Institute of IT on the UK Construction Industry Council.Matt is an award-winning CIO with significant, broad experience in sectors including Retail, Telecoms, Construction and Logistics having worked globally including across Europe, Middle East, Far East and US markets.

Matt has led large-scale off-shore outsourcing initiatives and worked with multiple organisations defining fit-for purpose technology sourcing models.

Rebecca Salsbury

CTO, Financial Times

Rebecca leads the Technology organisation at the FT, where teams are responsible for everything from the networks and laptops used by the FT’s staff in offices and locations around the world…to the technology which forms the FT’s subscription products and business-facing services.Prior to joining the FT, Rebecca’s career has largely centred on news and entertainment media in companies including Napster, BBC, Sky, and TiVo.

Her passions include developing leaders, creating inclusive team cultures, and encouraging collaboration across all disciplines in organisations. She claims to have gotten into tech “by accident” after originally taking degrees in Education, but loves what she does, and appreciates the privilege of leading teams in complex organisations with interesting challenges and problems to solve.