Job Title : CIO

Organization : Birds Eye Iglo Group

What they say about her: “A visible and inspiring IT leader. Creates a great business network to integrate IT into the business goals.”

The Birds Eye Igo Group was sold off to private equity group Permira for €1.7bn at the end of last year by Unilever as part of the sale of its frozen food business in Europe.

Tania Howarth took over as CIO of the new company in April 2007 with a remit to build a completely new systems platform for all the IT infrastructure and applications, build a new team and outsource contracts to manage it – all by the end of this year.

Prior to this Howarth was CIO for Coca Cola Europe and Africa for four years, where she successfully changed the profile of IT within the business by developing more business-focused skills among the IT team there.

Howarth’s other roles include CIO for Walkers Snack Foods between 1994 and 2003, systems manager at Sun Microsystems Europe in sales and marketing, and various project management and business analyst positions at ICI.