Peter Ryder became President of Socitm in April 2006 and has worked in local government IT for 37 years starting at the London Borough of Enfield and finishing up at Preston via the London Boroughs Management Services Unit (LBMSU), London On-Line Local Authorities (LOLA), London Borough of Hillingdon and Wyre Borough Council. He is the recent past chairman of the Socitm North West Branch (having also been chairman on a previous occasion), Chairman of the Local Government Users Association (LGUA), and is on the North West e-Government Group (NWegg) executive. As a member of Preston's e-champions team Peter has been instrumental in pushing the e-agenda within the authority and re-engineering the business processes across the council.

Tony Travers is director of LSE London, a research centre at the London School of Economics. His key research interests include local and regional government and public service reform. He is currently an advisor to the House of Commons Education and Skills Select Committee and has recently advised the ODPM Select Committee. From 1992 to 1997, he was a member of the Audit Commission. He was a member of the Urban Task Force Working Group on Finance. He has published a number of books on cities and government, and also broadcasts and writes for the national press.

John Nutley has worked in local government IT for over twenty years. As a system manager at City of Salford and latterly as Head of ICT at Carlisle City Council, he has been involved in all aspects of the provision of an ICT service to the busy and evolving business needs of local authorities. As part of his role at Carlisle he was responsible for creating, managing and running the new Customer Service Unit and, as part of the IEG programme, establishing the Council's Customer Contact Centre. It was during this period that Carlisle was devastated by flooding, after which he had to put both the ICT and Customer Service back together from scratch.

David Varney was Managing Director of Shell UK and later was appointed Director of Shell International. He was Chief Executive at British Gas and moved to take up the post of Executive Chairman at mmO2. He was chosen as Executive Chairman of Inland Revenue and HM Customs & Excise in September 2004. David stood down as Chairman in September 2006 in order to take up a short term position as The Chancellor’s senior advisor on Service Transformation. Two reports were produced at the 2006 Pre-Budget Report-HMRC links with large business and Service Transformation. David retired from the Civil Service in January 2007.

Andrew Moulton is the Corporate Head of IT at Wokingham Borough Council and is responsible for managing the Council’s outsourced IT services with its partner, Digica. A Chartered Accountant by background, Andrew joined local government in 1991 and was appointed as Wokingham Borough Council’s Head of Audit in 2000. In 2001, he was promoted to Head of IT, and subsequently appointed as Corporate Head of IT in 2002. As well as being responsible for all of the Council's ICT systems, Andrew is leading on the design and implementation of a corporate “business change” unit covering all the Council’s key programmes and projects.

David Lewis became an IT specialist in 1977. Through the development of workflow management software he became involved with a service management and software organisation (Ultracomp) who had a significant presence providing services in the public sector and in particular local Government. Dave continued in the sector, and is now working for Digica (Part of the Computacenter group), where he heads up public sector as a business unit with the specific responsibility for developing transformational services. The long term relationship with Wokingham Borough Council, providing software solutions and technical support, led to a full outsourcing contract in 2000. This has now developed into a full partnership.

Martin Greenwood has been an independent consultant since 1992 working with local authorities and other public sector bodies. Before helping Socitm set up the Socitm Insight service in 1992, Martin's early career involved periods in two local authorities plus one spell in the private sector and then a number of senior I.T. management positions at Warwickshire C.C. Martin now manages the Socitm Insight programme run by Socitm. Socitm Insight is a subscription service to which over 400 local authorities and other public sector organisations now subscribe.

Steve Scott trained as a Civil Engineer. He began his career working as children's services manager, exploiting IT and publishing to help to provide efficient services. Realising that this was where his true strength lay, he took a Masters degree in Information Technology. Steve has been Web Manager at Leicester City Council for over 7 years and has been instrumental in transforming their website. He has day-to-day responsibility for the development, implementation and ongoing operation of the site. Leicester's website was judged one of the top twenty most developed websites in 2006.

Shilpa Arya is a Senior Human Resources Advisor at Leicester City Council where she started work in 1985 on a temporary six week contract!  Shilpa’s career spans 20 years in human resources both in operational personnel and corporate HR where she has lead a number of HR related projects. She also provides advice and support on complex HR issues. Shilpa’s achievements at work include the transformation of the Council’s paper-based recruitment processes into the highly successful on-line recruitment system ‘Recruit’. More recently she has developed the Council’s Disability Equality Scheme and developed a Council-wide childcare scheme.