Information Age: News and Intelligence for Technology Leaders
Information Age is a London-based technology news service for business and IT leaders, published at information-age.com. Founded as a print magazine in 1995, it now operates as a fully digital title supporting chief technology officers, chief information officers and other senior technologists with news, analysis, guidance and research on the issues that shape enterprise technology, from digital transformation and data to artificial intelligence and cybersecurity.
For three decades the title has occupied a distinctive position in British technology media: written not for consumers or hobbyists, but for the executives accountable for technology inside large organisations. Its interviews with CIOs, its coverage of major IT programmes and, above all, its creation of the Women in IT Awards have made it a familiar name to the UK's enterprise technology community.
Overview
The publication describes its mission as providing general intelligence for technologists. Its online portal delivers the latest news, analysis, guidance and research for its CTO community, while a live events programme brings those leaders together to network, share best practice and celebrate achievement. A weekly newsletter carries insight and analysis on the trends affecting technology chiefs directly to subscribers.
Subject coverage spans the enterprise agenda: digital transformation, data and analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning, cybersecurity, cloud and infrastructure, technology regulation and compliance, smart cities, IT management and emerging technologies. The common thread is business impact, how a technology changes costs, risks and opportunities for the organisation adopting it, rather than the technology in isolation.
History and Founding
Information Age was founded in 1995 as a print magazine, arriving as the web, the Y2K programme and the dot-com boom were transforming corporate IT. Its own tenth-anniversary coverage in August 2005 looked back on a first decade that it noted spanned the birth and growth of the web, the dot-com rise and fall, and the rise of security and mobility as boardroom concerns. The brand launched its website in 2001, beginning a long migration from print to digital.
The events business grew alongside publishing. The Data Leadership Summit was launched in 2011 and expanded into an awards event, together with the launch of the Tech Leaders Summit, the following year. The Women in IT Awards programme was launched in 2014, with its inaugural ceremony in January 2015. In 2017 the title completed its evolution into a fully digital proposition, ending the print era, and the Tech Leaders Awards were launched in the same year.
Ownership and Leadership
For much of its modern history Information Age was published by Vitesse Media, the London business media group that also published GrowthBusiness, SmallBusiness.co.uk and What Investment. Pete Swabey served as editor of Information Age and head of technology research for Vitesse Media from 2005 to 2013 before moving to the Economist Intelligence Unit, while Ben Rossi became the title's best-known editorial figure as group editor and editorial director, founding the Women in IT Awards during his tenure. Tim Langford served as publisher of the title.
In September 2018 Vitesse Media rebranded as Bonhill Group, continuing to publish Information Age and its sister titles, with staff moving to Bonhill email addresses. Bonhill expanded the Women in IT Awards internationally and published the title into the 2020s, with Nick Ismail among its content editors. More recent site pages list a London address at Stubben Edge, 77 Cornhill in the City of London, reflecting the title's latest publishing home, while the brand, archive and events identity have remained continuous through the changes of ownership.
Services and Distribution
The core service is the information-age.com website, which publishes daily news, interviews, analysis and contributed thought leadership for technology leaders. Regular magazine-style issues were produced during the print and early digital years, with themed editions devoted to subjects such as diversity in technology, and the archive of those issues remains part of the site. A redesigned monthly magazine was unveiled in April 2014 before the title's full digital transition in 2017.
Beyond the website, distribution includes the weekly newsletter, social channels including LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, and the events programme. The title actively invites authoritative practitioners to contribute, publishing contributor guidelines for industry thought leaders who wish to share experience with its CTO community, a model that supplements staff journalism with practitioner insight.
Coverage Areas
Enterprise technology leadership is the organising theme. Information Age interviews CIOs and CTOs about transformation programmes in banking, retail, sport and government, examines deployments of cloud, data and automation technologies, and reports the month's major industry moves, vendor strategies and mergers. Historical features on organisations such as UEFA, whose head of ICT explained the systems behind European football, and on retailers and banks undergoing digital change illustrate the case-study style at the heart of the title.
Diversity in technology became a second defining beat. The January 2017 issue was dedicated entirely to diversity, and the title campaigned for years on the under-representation of women in IT, reporting the statistics, profiling role models and building the awards programme that grew from that campaign. Artificial intelligence, data leadership and cybersecurity have since joined diversity as recurring pillars of coverage.
Digital Platforms
The move to a fully digital proposition in 2017 made the website, newsletters and social media the title's sole platforms. Content is organised for busy executives: news flashes, deployment watch items, CIO spotlights and boardroom interviews offer multiple entry points into the same technology agenda. Downloads of past magazine issues, award shortlist announcements and event coverage keep the archive working as a resource for the community.
The digital shift also internationalised the audience. While the readership remains anchored in the UK, the expansion of its awards to the United States, Ireland and Asia brought the brand to technology leaders in New York, Silicon Valley, Dublin and Singapore, with the website serving as the shared platform for nominations, shortlists and results across all territories.
Clients and Media Partners
Information Age's events depended on deep partnerships with the technology industry. The inaugural Women in IT Awards were organised in partnership with Salesforce, and later editions were supported by Amazon Web Services as headline partner, alongside sponsors and partners that have included Accenture Security, BP, Google Cloud, HSBC, J.P. Morgan, Lloyds Banking Group, Oracle, Red Hat, Rolls-Royce and many others. The Tech Partnership, the employer body for the technology sector, supported the diversity work with research and advocacy.
On the publishing side, commercial partners advertise to reach a concentrated audience of senior IT decision-makers, sponsor events and contribute expertise. Employers such as BT, John Lewis, Ocado Technology, Rolls-Royce and Tesco took part in the Tomorrow's Tech Leaders Today careers fair run alongside the awards, underlining the title's role as a meeting point between the technology profession and the organisations that employ it.
Notable Work
The Women in IT Awards are Information Age's most notable creation. Launched by the title in 2014 and first held in January 2015 at Grosvenor House on London's Park Lane, the awards grew into what was described as the largest technology diversity event ever staged, drawing more than 1,000 business and technology leaders by 2017 and around 1,200 by 2019. Hosted in its first year by broadcaster Maggie Philbin, the ceremony honoured Bletchley Park codebreaker Betty Webb and showcased categories from CIO of the Year to Security Champion of the Year.
The 2017 awards produced one of the title's most striking moments when Alex Younger, head of the Secret Intelligence Service, made a rare public speech revealing that the real-life head of MI6's technology function, its 'Q', was a woman, underlining the event's reach into the highest levels of British public life. The associated Future Stars of Tech programme and the Tomorrow's Tech Leaders Today careers fair extended the work from celebration to recruitment and early careers.
Recent Developments
The awards series continued its global expansion under Bonhill, adding editions in Ireland, Silicon Valley and New York, launching in the USA with a New York event in March 2018, and planning further editions in Europe, Asia and Canada, including Asia in Singapore and Europe in Berlin in 2019. The sixth London edition was scheduled for January 2020 at Grosvenor House, in association with AWS, with a record 1,200 attendance at the preceding year's event.
Editorially, the title's recent agenda is dominated by artificial intelligence, data, cybersecurity and digital transformation, the same business-critical issues it sets out to help CTOs manage. Now in its fourth decade since its 1995 founding, Information Age endures as a case study in how a specialist print magazine reinvented itself as a digital community, using events and a diversity campaign of genuine scale to remain relevant to the technology leaders it was created to serve.
