Job Title : Group CIO

Organization : National Grid

David Lister is group CIO of utilities company National Grid and a fixture on the silicon.com CIO50 list. He has featured on the list every year since the inaugural CIO50, back in 2007.

Lister has been at the National Grid since March 2009, joining from financial services giant RBS where he was group CIO and chief architect, leading the development of a future operations and technology strategy and incorporating the integration of ABN Amro.

At the National Grid, Lister has been leading a transformation of the company’s technology strategy. He is also working to drive changes in skills and capabilities that will be required for the company to build and operate a smarter, digitally managed grid – to deliver on national sustainable energy goals. Partnering is another key component of the National Grid’s IT strategy – with new relationships being built with HP, IBM and Verizon in recent years, to add to the long-serving partnerships with CSC, TCS and Wipro.

Prior to RBS, Lister was CIO at news agency Reuters and before that at Boots the Chemists. He has also held senior IT positions at Glaxo Welcome, Diageo, Guinness and Coopers & Lybrand, and has been a board member of UK IT sector skills council e-skills UK, and a non-executive director on the IX Europe Board.

Lister’s love of infrastructure hasn’t always been centred on IT – he studied architecture at the University of Edinburgh.