Nigel Watson

Chief Information Officer, Northumbrian Water

Nigel has worked in business and IT roles across a range of competitive industries for more than 40 years. His work experience includes leadership of transformation programmes for leading organisations including GE Capital, Microsoft, Travelport and Vodafone, often across the globe. He has been with Northumbrian Water Group since 2015, joining as Transformation Programme Director. In this role he led the market opening programmes for both Retail and Wholesale.

Starting in August 2016 Nigel took up the role of CIO. Since that time, he has the successful delivery of our Customer Transformation Programme and our Intelligent Asset Management programme, with an overall ambition of making us the most digital water company in the world. Nigel chairs the UK Water CIO forum.

Nigel is responsible for the innovation strategy and execution across the Group. In this guise he helped to create our Innovation Festival, which is now in its seventh year. The event attracts c. 3,000 participants from 900 organisations around the world, generating hundreds of ideas to improve our business. The 2018 festival led to the creation of the National Underground Asset Register, a project that is worth £340m a year to UK Plc.

Nigel is co-chair of our Retail Joint Venture, Wave, a business with a turnover of c. £500m. He is also a member of the CBI’s Innovation Council and also an independent non-executive director of Your Homes Newcastle.