I think most people would call me a IT veteran as been in the industry over 30+ years now! I joined CAE back 2000 after 11 years at Computacenter. First role was Service Manager and over the next 4 years became a co-owner and Board member as part of initial MBO back in 2004. I have held various positions on the board between 2004-2018 and it was so rewarding see CAE grow from strength to strength and being part of that successful team. Since stepping down from the board in 2018, I moved into a Culture Director role, which was really exciting and challenging being part of a team involved in setting up and defining our Culture. My present role is now a Business Coach which is simply the most rewarding role I could ever wish for. I’ve always been fascinated about the human potential and what motivates individuals, as we are all unique and have different aspirations/challenges in life. I get immense satisfaction working with people and watching them grow and develop into best versions of themselves in both work and life outside of IT! In addition to having a MBA over the past 10+ years studied and Certified in NLP, Coaching/Mentoring and Executive Coaching.

Alice is a Chapter Lead in the central Data Science team at Lloyds Banking Group. She leads 3 large programmes of work including: the group’s data science lifecycle, the group’s model inventory & risk management tool & the ethical ai library. Her background is in consulting & data mining/statistics (with an MSc in Marketing & Business Analysis from the University of Edinburgh) with over 10 years’ experience, including 5 at Lloyds. Outside her day to day role, she is involved in a number of activities close to her heart: she is the Steerco Lead for Women in Data at LBG, a contributor to the Women ConnecTech network, and a leading member of the Inclusion & Diversity pillar. This is Alice's 4th year of being a judge for these awards, having herself won an award in 2020

Alina Timofeeva is a distinguished expert in Data & Technology, celebrated with numerous accolades including Digital Person of the Year, and the prestigious UK IT Awards – Most Inspiring Person of the Year. As a TEDx speaker and LinkedIn Top Voice in Technology she is looking to inspire 50,000,000 million globally to see failure as an opportunity to grow – whether in Technology or in the personal journey. Her remarkable journey ‘Fail, but Never Give Up’ about breaking barriers in the male dominated technology industry has motivated over 1,500,000 individuals across 150 countries and 23 languages.

Amanda is a 30-year IT veteran starting her career in South Africa. She has worked for a variety of IT vendors including Unisys, Visio, Microsoft and SAP in a variety of customer and partner facing roles across Europe, Africa and the Middle East. Amanda joined AWS in 2019 where she has held several positions including EMEA Partner lead and UKI SMB Lead, today she leads the UKI ProServe team supporting customers to reimagine their business go to markets and digital strategy.

Becky is a content and communications manager with years of experience in marketing. She is passionate about helping teams drive successful outcomes through content marketing, and delivering valuable insight to clients, ensuring the content she creates resonates with her audience and helps readers reach their goals. Working with both public and private sector clients, she is always looking at the current trends affecting the market and what that means for the future of the industry. Becky is passionate about working closely with delivery teams to understand the challenges in the industry from the ground up and gain insight at every level.

My core focus is to help Computacenter customers and vendor stakeholders understand and mitigate real-world challenges presented by Cyber security to IT systems and business outcomes. 

17 years at Computacenter Prior to Computacenter, I held roles at Compaq, BT, Morse, and HP and numerous other leading IT organisations. 30+ years in IT strategy & leadership positions as an innovative technology thinker and future focused strategist offering unique perspectives on the cyber security industry, business change, vendors and with a specialism in early stage / emerging cyber technologies

Emily Hall-Strutt is the Director of Next Tech Girls, a social enterprise that aims to inspire girls and young women - especially those from ethnic minority or lower income backgrounds - to pursue a career in the tech industry. With over 10 years’ experience in various tech roles, ranging from front end software development to social media management to user research, she is also trained as a Scrum Master and Agile Coach and is an award-winning Diversity, Equity and Inclusion leader. She previously worked in government, mainly at the Ministry of Justice, where she managed the delivery of accessible online services for courts, prisons and the probation service, and increased representation and engagement of all minoritised groups across the Digital and Technology teams. At Next Tech Girls, Emily is on a mission to #SmashTheStereotype and directly engage 10,000 girls around the UK in women-led tech-focused online events and work experience placements by the end of 2023, and 250,000 around the world by 2030.

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%.

Lizz has been awarded IT &Telecommunications CCO of the year 2024 and Transformation Leader of the year 2022 recognised from her consistence contribution within the industry and unrivalled leadership. Her deep understanding of business strategy, commercial landscape and her ability to drive growth and innovation contribution significantly to her success. She is committed to and passionate about developing and empowering people thus driving further success on a larger scale. By critically reviewing the status quo and providing creative new approached both enabling people to grow and the business to improve. She is relied upon for her strategic thinking, dedication, leadership and ingenuity. This is embodied in her creation of the innovative Business Transformation team and newly implemented sales graduate scheme, which has already produced several high performing colleagues in various areas of the business. Lizz holds responsibility for driving and leading business strategy, commercial, sales operations and solution & partner strategy.

Maria Thorpe leads the data science teams across two MSQ agencies, 26PMX and MSQData, to deliver data engineering, analytics and insight, ML and conversion rate optimisation for the group. She works with agency clients to drive forward their digital maturity and marketing effectiveness to deliver business growth enabled by data. With experience across a number of industries she’s passionate about leveraging data and data science to create actionable insight that answers business problems and about improving diversity in the data profession, speaking on panels at the AI and Big Data Expo and podcasts like SheCanCode to discuss more women can be encouraged to the enter the industry

Michelle Conway is a Lead Data Scientist at Lloyds Banking Group, having joined the group in 2018 as part of the Machine Intelligence Program, which applies machine learning at scale. With over 13 years of technical data experience across various sectors, she now works in an MLOps team. Her role sees her leading the charge on several production projects, delivering impactful results, and spearheading innovative solutions that drive the business forward. A mentor at heart, Michelle's contributions extend beyond project deliverables to nurturing the growth and development of emerging talent within her team. Her passion for data science is evident in her work, particularly in deploying machine learning models into production and transitioning to the new platform on Google Cloud. Outside of her technical endeavours, Michelle is a community advocate, having established a thriving network for women engaged in Python-based data science projects. Originally from Ireland, she’s now soaking in the London vibe, appreciating its culture and awesome artwork

Pallavi is a Technology leader with 2 decades of digital industry experience. She has held many Technology roles across different companies. Have experience working for different clients across USA, Singapore, India and UK. Currently working as Director-Portfolio Delivery at Pearson London, UK. She is the winner of "Digital Leader of the Year - Enterprise" at Women in Tech Excellence awards 2022. She has received many recognitions for her work in the Technology teams for successful delivery and exceeding client expectations. She is known for building high performing teams, bringing in transparency and collaboration at work. She is certified AWS Cloud Architect Associate, AWS Cloud Practitioner and Microsoft certified professional. Advocates Agile ways of working in the teams and builds the Communities of practice. Apart from her day job she actively contributes to Women in Technology (WIT) community at Pearson for various initiatives to help non-tech women to learn tech skills. Leads Social impact program in the UK to help under privileged students to get view of technology world and get insights to role models in tech.

Rebecca is part of the IT Leadership team at The Meliore Foundation, who work with global philanthropic funding partners in supporting programmes to educate and encourage fact-based discourse at community, societal, commercial and policy-making levels. Rebecca joined the team in August 2021, under its previous parent organisation with an initial task of facilitating its independence, building and shaping the IT function to sustain it. The diversity of her team and workforce is what makes them successful. "Working for good" provides satisfaction and motivation she has not experienced elsewhere. She has a background in scale-ups, notably in the energy consulting sector and brings strengths including Quality Management and Strategy Delivery to her role.

Sam’s role as Head of Business Systems Technology focuses on developing and running the core applications and services for Lowell. Her role sees her leading on projects to enhance and deliver stable and performant key business applications as well as providing a base for the customer digital offerings to leverage. Sam believes in the power of servant leadership and enjoys seeing her team grow in confidence and shine brightly. Sam was shortlisted for the ‘Leader of the Year’ at the Women in Tech Excellence Awards 2023 and appears on 2024 Computing 100 IT Leaders list which recognises the most influential figures in UK IT.

Sarah’s role as Head of Core Platform & Migration Services, focuses on building and transforming the platforms of the future and migrating products and services from legacy platforms to where they can offer best value and service to the customer. Her role also looks at the way technology change is introduced and new technology services, redesigning for automation and data-driven decision making to make the route to live simpler and more resilient. Sarah’s strong background in both finance and technology enables her to easily navigate the everchanging business and technology landscape and having a passion for change, she has completed digital and cloud transformations across various sectors. Sarah was a winner of the 2022 HPE Future CIO 100 and was named ‘Hero of the Year’ at the Women in Tech Excellence Awards 2020, both of which recognises UK tech's most dynamic and influential leaders. Sarah is now a regular on the judging panel for the WiT awards.

Sophia Steiger is Head of DAO for the United Kingdom, MENAT and Europe. Accountable for both HSBC UK and the non-ring fenced bank in the UK. Sophia has nearly 30 years of experience of utilising data to deliver enterprise value. Sophia has held roles at Board, Global Exco and Regional level, so understands the breadth of data available to the organisation and the challenges of extracting and delivering insight and value. Sophia has a 1st Class Honours degree in Technology and Business covering artificial intelligence and neural networks, combined with professional qualifications both in Finance and Data. Sophia has a track record of creating high performing teams and delivering results across the complex matrix ecosystem, both on regulatory, risk/controls and efficiency topics. Sophia’s attention to: mentoring; active diversity management and external networks such as being a judge for the Women in Technology awards – shows her multi-dimensional people focus, at all levels. This and her proven Role Model behaviours in her delivery style and adaptability, are key to her ability to combine organisations, attract the very best and be a 10X value deliverer. Outside of work Sophia loves adrenaline sports, focusing on skiing, snowboarding, mountain biking and paddleboarding.

I’m Stephanie Hart, End User Compute Lead within Network Rail’s Digital, Data and Technology Services with over 12 years IT experience. I won the Hero of the Year: Enterprise award at the 2021 Women in Tech Excellence Awards. I was awarded an MBE in the King’s 2023 New Year’s honours list for services to the Railway and Education. Diversity and Inclusion in the workplace is always at the forefront of my mind and how technology can be used to make the workplace a more inclusive environment. I’m an extremely passionate person and always look to empower those around me to help drive and enhance technology changes. Sustainability, the environment and how we contribute to and can help change for the better is really important to me.

More ‘I’ than ‘T’, Tanya originally fell into a Data Protection role, which turned out to be a lucky break as it has led to a career in the evolving field of information governance/management, becoming ever more relevant as the art of the possible in technology becomes even greater. As a result she is a specialist in legislation such as Data Protection UK/GDPR, Freedom of Information and Regulation of Investigatory Powers, working in the public sector, for nearly twenty years. Tanya won the Returner of the Year award 2022 in recognition of a number of achievements made following a return to work from maternity leave within a relatively short space of time, whilst still a new mother. Tanya believes in working to inspire her child as they grow and make decisions about their own path in life, and in supporting women to both recognise their potential and to celebrate their achievements (such as by way of these awards). Tanya has since been developing her personal leadership skills, including coaching and mentoring, gaining a distinction for a CMI apprenticeship in Leadership.

As UK&I End User Sales Director, Zoe is currently responsible for the End User business for HPI UK Inc and has overall responsibility for all customer vertical sectors- Financial Services & Insurance, Manufacturing, Retail, Public Sector, Defense & Ireland. Zoe has accountability for P&L, budgeting, cost control, strategic partnering and business development. Zoe is a strong believer in the power of people and is passionate about people and their development. Zoe has been with HP for 9 years and has held various roles across the end user space. Most recently as the NWE Sales Enablement Director, focused on driving go to market strategies and enhancing the pan HP customer experience. Prior to this, Zoe served as the Financial Service sector manager for the UK & Ireland market. Zoe started her career in technology at Brother UK Ltd where she held various internal & external based assignments across the UK & Ireland over a 10-year period. Zoe lives in Lichfield with her family and enjoys spending time with friends & family along with great wine and food.

Zoe is a survivor of a high-profile domestic violence attack having been tortured and held for over 8 hours. Although she escaped with her life, she was then subjected to a justice system that she describes as broken. Using her 20+ years of professional experience working across Public Sector; Health, Law Enforcement & Local Authority advising on technology and services that support government policy, and having ran a child protection agency, she can see clearly where the system is failing, so is compelled to make a difference. A regular commentator in the media, Zoe is a campaigner for the rights of women, victims of domestic abuse and stalking. She has made fundamental changes in both the criminal and family justice system using her own experiences to highlight failings and has changed legislation to close loopholes. Zoe is on the Trust Board of Paladin National stalking advocacy service, the first trauma informed service for high-risk victims of stalking and sits on the Victim & Witness Engagement Group at Ministry of Justice (MoJ) inputting into court reform. Zoe has even incorporated her keen interest in property to help others and owns a property portfolio in her home city Coventry, where she works with local charities to house victims of abuse and homelessness.