James established WinningCIO in 2018 after a distinguished career as CIO for Northern Rail, Abellio, Northumbrian Water, Drax where he led diverse teams to industry leading success. Over a 15 year CIO career he was frequently nominated in the CIO100 list and was Computing & BCS No 2 in 2016. He has been a champion of women in tech as an ever present judge and panelist since 2015. Outside of WinningCIO, James is a visiting fellow at Loughbrough University, a non exec director for The Wisegroup and trustee of the solar energy charity Tunaamini. Current projects include:

• IT Benchmarking
• Digital Delivery Models
• AI transformation strategy development
• AI boardroom coaching
• IT divestiture post M&A
• Regulatory review preparation
• Digital Decarbonisation
• Predictive Analytics with Gen AI for industry performance improvement.

WinningCIO is a fractional consulting and events business which supports CIO’s across Europe with coaching and fractional transformation consulting across our network of 250+ CIO’s. Our clients include UKPN, Southeastern Railway, Royalmail, Expleo Group, Currency fair, Pyramid Analytics and Reltio. Current projects include service benchmarking, In 2023 our events and fractional consulting received an NPS score of 80%.