A powerful community of peers

The Corporate IT Forum was founded in 1996 by large corporate users of IT for large corporate users of IT to provide unbiased knowledge and insights for enterprise users. Its mission is to enrich the decision making capabilities of Boards, CIOs and CTOs and their teams.

The Forum represents some of the biggest and most admired brands in the UK. Participants comprises over 320 companies and public sector bodies. Together these organisations have 145,000 professional IT staff and employ more than six million people.

Members use the Forum for practical experience sharing and insights on areas such as procurement, implementation, experiences of enterprise IT problems and solutions, emerging technologies and trends and process improvements.

With the help of a modest service team, the Advisory Group provides direction for best solutions, strategies and ways of working.

The Advisory Group

The Forum’s Advisory Group includes CIOs and senior executives from:

Members of the Advisory Group include:

Mark Bramwell (FBCS), Head of IT, Wellcome Trust

Mark Bramwell is the Head of IT for the Wellcome Trust, which with an asset value of c£14bn, is the world's largest biomedical research charity. Mark has been at the Trust for 6 years, prior to which he worked as Head of IT Development for WHSmith Limited.

Inspired and motivated by the extraordinary work of the Trust, and its tangible benefits to human and animal health, Mark is currently embarking on the delivery of his second IT Strategy and was shortlisted for 2011 CIO Of The Year at the UK IT Industry Awards, as well as being named in the UKTech50 most influential IT Leaders in the UK IT industry.

A Fellow of the British Computer Society (FBCS), Mark is married with 2 children, lives in Wiltshire and commutes to London each day.

Clifford Burroughs, Group IS & Lean Director, United Biscuits

Clifford's career started in the early 90's as part of a startup consultancy specialising in Management Information Systems for senior executives. He worked with a number of blue chip companies across Europe before accepting a full time role with United Biscuits in 1998.

Clifford has had a number of roles in UB, initially working in the International division and then moving to the UK as part of a SAP implementation, where he was responsible for the Data Warehousing and Management Reporting workstreams.

In recent years he has been the programme director for a change project spanning UB's businesses in France, Belgium and Holland. Clifford took on the role of IS Director for the UB group in March 2006 and is focused on driving the UB growth agenda. In addition, during August 2008, he was also given responsibility to drive the enterprise wide Lean initiative across the group and subsequently became Group IS & Lean Director in June 2011.

Malcolm is responsible for the Corporation's overall information management and technology strategy and architecture providing the policies, processes, standards and leadership to deliver coherence across BAE Systems plc's businesses in all countries.

Prior to this Malcolm held a number of IT management positions covering operational and policy roles in oil & gas, power generation, defence electronics and marine engineering. He has international experience having lived in The Netherlands for ten years during which time he led the IT team providing services to operations in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Romania, Thailand and the UK.

Malcolm represents BAE Systems on a number of industry and government liaison bodies including The Corporate IT Forum's Advisory Group, Transglobal Secure Collaboration Program and the Exostar LLC Security Executive Committee.

Mark Fabes, UK IT Director, McDonald's

Mark is responsible for the provision of all IT services to McDonald's restaurants and corporate locations in the UK. Within the UK, there are 1,200 restaurants serving between 2.5 and 3million customers per day.

Prior to McDonald's, he was Director of Business Support Systems at Whitbread Group PLC and Head of IT at Allders Department Stores.

John Harris, Vice President of Enterprise Architecture, AIMIA and Chairman of The Corporate IT Forum

John is Vice President of Enterprise Architecture at AIMIA, a global leader in loyalty management who are best known in the UK for the leading coalition program, Nectar. John is responsible for leading a transformational technology roadmap and a series of innovation initiatives designed to improve AIMIAs global capabilities without losing the agility that is imperative for success. To achieve this, John is leveraging a blend of cloud and consumer based technologies to quickly deliver a simple common experience for the AIMIA employee and driving major investment in four client-facing product technologies that will enable AIMIA to maximise insightful use of data to create win \ win relationships for clients and consumers.

John joined AIMIA in November 2012 after 18 years in a variety of senior roles at GlaxoSmithKline culminating in his last role as global head of strategy and architecture. John is also Chairman of industry user group, The Corporate IT Forum, acting as the voice of more than 100 major UK public and private sector IT organisations and is also chair of the Education & Skills Commission, which The Forum set up to ensure that the voice of industries that use technology was heard as the government reconsiders the UK technology education curriculum.

John lives in Buckinghamshire, is married with 2 kids, is a keen marathon runner and is passionate about consumer technology, most sports and Leeds United!

An IT professional of 14 years, Mark has held positions throughout the IT arena. Starting as Graduate within GlaxoWellcome in 1998, Mark served his IT apprenticeship in Data Centre Operations, which included a stint loading back-up tapes into over 400 servers. In the years since he has been responsible for researching and defining global strategies in Voice and Collaboration. Mark also ran Global Finance Application services, living with the inception of Sarbanes Oxley as well the programme management of an application migration from Lotus Notes. Today he is Head of Application Services at A&N Media where he is responsible for the service management of the organisation Editorial, Advertising, CRM and Back-Office Applications.

Mark has been a strong advocate of The Corporate IT Forum and upon joining A&N Media in 2010 (now called dmg media) ensured they took up membership. In 2008 he joined the Advisory Group. He personally finds it a rewarding experience and believes it rewards those who actively seek and share new knowledge. Mark strongly believe The Corporate IT Forum is great assets in ensuring the Corporate IT department doesn't fall foul of being just that internal insular admin function.

Outside of work and The Forum, Mark has a young family and enjoys planning holidays that stretch his scuba diving experiences.

Ian Macdonald, Head of Operational Control Centre, The Co-operative Group

Ian MacDonald is a Senior IT professional who has undertaken a wide variety of Leadership and Management roles across IT covering Operations, Support, Service Management and Consultancy.

In recent years has gained significant experience of improving IT performance and organisational capability through the adoption of ITIL and related best practice frameworks.

Within the IT Industry Ian has had active participation supporting User Groups, Forums and industry bodies such as Guide Share Europe, UKCMG, ITSMF and the Office of Government Commerce.

An accredited ITIL author, Ian has gained UK and International recognition for the development of IT Service Management ‘best practice'.

Gareth Naylor, Senior Product Portfolio Manager, E.ON IT

With over 20 years experience in the Utility Industry Gareth has worked in a variety of roles, including outsourcing implementation, transition and transformation; creation and execution of Infrastructure Strategy at CIO office level; leading an Information Security and Infrastructure Architecture team; and technical Consultancy across the sales to support lifecycle for FTSE 100 Companies.

Gareth's work interests include personal development of young people in the IT world; putting people in touch with each other and finding win-win situations; the measurement of home energy consumption and energy creation, and energy efficiency; trend spotting and communication; and ensuring The Corporate IT Forum is successful.

Andrew Willicott, Customer Service & IT Director, South West Water

Andrew Willicott is responsible for all aspects of Customer Contact, Metering, Billing and Collections processes, Reporting and Compliance. His role includes responsibility for IT across the company and leadership of strategic business change programmes responsible for delivering significant service and efficiency benefits.

Andrew is also the Chief Executive of Source Contact Management Ltd, a South West Water subsidiary company providing Call Centre services.

In addition he is a member of the Devon and Cornwall Board of the Institute of Directors.