CIO job changes round-up

TUI Travel

Global leisure company TUI Travel has appointed Mats Eklund as ‘mainstream’ CIO, reporting to group CIO Mittu Sridhara.

TUI is undergoing a transformation programme, dubbed ‘One Mainstream’, which aims to enable IT teams to work as one, moving disparate teams and systems to a single, common platform.

Sweden-based Eklund was director of business and IT transformation Mainstream at TUI from June 2012 to February 2014, when he took up the CIO role.

According to his Linkedin profile, as transformation director, he led the mobilisation and engagement phase of the company’s ongoing digital solutions programme for the global group. This is in addition to driving the strategic business development and IT transformation for TUI’s businesses in Europe.

He has been at TUI in a variety of senior IT roles since 2000, prior to which he was in managerial positions at Sweden’s national postal service, Posten.

Ministry of Justice and the University of Cambridge

Last month, Ben Booth took up the role of interim director of change and ICT at the Ministry of Justice’s (MoJ) National Offender Management Service (NOMS).

He replaced Martin Bellamy, who was in the NOMS role between June 2010 to February 2014. Bellamy left NOMS to become director of information services at the University of Cambridge this month.

Booth’s background includes positions as CTO and CIO of market research company Ipsos MORI, head of technology at Reed Business Information and head of information systems at The Science Museum in London.

Meanwhile, Bellamy was previously crown representative at the Cabinet Office, G-Cloud programme director, and also had senior IT roles at the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).

Avis Budget Group and Rank Group

Neal Sunners joined vehicle hire company Avis permanently in December 2013 as CIO of EMEA.

He had been working as interim group IT director in the UK between April 2012 to November 2013 as an independent consultant under Enness Consultancy, which, according to his Linkedin profile, was established as a “vehicle for independent consulting and interim management positions”.

As interim director, he delivered organisation transformation, optimising use of outsourcing, introducing systems development lifecycle (SDLC) processes, attained Sarbanes-Oxley (SOx) compliance, and provided multi-million pound savings each year for the company.

The 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act requires companies to put in measures to protect investors from accounting fraud, and the most significant feature for IT is compliance in terms of electronic records. Under the law, companies must be able to produce any electronic data, including email messages, if requested during an investigation.

As a consultant, he also worked for loyalty programme platforms company Collinson Group.

Sunners replaced Keith Woodcock, who moved to become CIO at European gambling and leisure firm Rank Group, which owns Mecca bingo, in September 2013.