Specsaver's Phil Pavitt to leave after three years as global CIO at the company

Phil Pavitt to move on at the end of June this year

Seasoned CIO Phil Pavitt is moving on from his role as global CIO of Specsavers after three years at the company.

Pavitt disclosed the news in a LinkedIn post, revealing that he would leave the company at the end of June this year.

The message read: "Today, John Perkins (joint CEO) and I have announced that I will be leaving Specsavers at the end June 2017. An incredible amount has been achieved and the revolution has now been turned into a funded activity plan globally led by a new, strong technology leadership team.

"This being the case, John and I agree that now is the right time to put in place the leadership that will build on this strong platform, and focus on execution and rolling out of our plans. It has been a fantastic experience for me and now it's time for the next and probably final chapter!"

Pavitt has been an IT leader for several decades. He was group CIO and integration director at NTL Group in the 1990s and became CIO of NTL in 2003.

In 2007, he moved from retail gas and electricity supplier Centrica to Transport for London (TfL), where he was group CIO, and after nearly three years moved-on to HMRC as director general of change and CIO.

He moved back into the private sector with Aviva in 2013, and became global CIO of Specsavers in 2014.

As well as speaking to V3's sister publication Computing about his role in digitally transforming Specsavers Pavitt has spoken candidly about some of the biggest trends and talking points in the IT industry over a number of years.

At a conference in 2014, he said that the government had "pimped out its front-end" but "not changed its legacy engines", and in 2015 he told Computing that the system integrator market was "huge, fat and lazy" and that procurement teams were the "biggest enemy" to SMEs trying to break-in to government.

Last year, he suggested that Oracle's "traumatic" licensing methodology worked and so it would be unlikely to change, regardless of how much customers complained. He added that DevOps was not a silver bullet for development teams, but does have some merit.