Leaders Profile: Jenny Rae, CIO, Imperial College

Leaders Profile with Jenny Rae: Why curiosity is one of technology leadership’s most important skills

From believing she did not belong at Microsoft to becoming CIO at one of the world’s leading universities, Jenny speaks to HotTopics about the changing role of the CIO, AI in higher education and why helping the next generation see themselves in the industry matters.

Sitting in her office at Imperial College’s South Kensington campus, Jenny Rae is reflecting on a decision she almost never made.

Today, Rae is the CIO at Imperial, responsible for the technology strategy underpinning an institution ranked first in the UK and Europe and second globally in the latest QS World University Rankings.

Yet, when an opportunity to work at Microsoft appeared when she was studying for her business degree, her immediate reaction was that she did not belong there.

“I saw the job advert for Microsoft and I was like, ‘I can’t go and work there. It’s a tech company. I don’t really know anything about tech.’” It took some encouragement from her partner for Rae to apply. Naturally, she got the job.

What followed was a placement year in Microsoft’s business projects unit in the early 2000s and an introduction to an industry that would ultimately define her career.

“Within the first few weeks, I was just exposed to the technology,” she recalls. “I was blown away by what you could do with technology and how it could create business value, how it could change the way people work [and] how it could really influence and make a difference to companies as to whether they succeeded or failed, but also make a difference to individuals.”

“That was where I got the bug.”

Microsoft invited Rae to return after graduation. She did, spending another three years with the company before embarking on a career that would take her through telecommunications , product management, business transformation, start-ups and eventually higher education.

It is a career trajectory that looks deliberate in hindsight. Rae’s own account suggests something quite different, a willingness to enter unfamiliar territory, ask questions and learn quickly.

Curiosity is the new leadership strategy

After Microsoft, Rae moved into telecommunications, spending 15 years across businesses including BT and Vodafone before working at satellite communications company OneWeb and later an InsurTech startup.

She joined Imperial in January 2022 as director of digital products, her first role in higher education, before moving into the CIO position. Imperial formally appointed Rae as CIO in October 2023, replacing Juan Villamil.

On paper, moving between software, telecommunications, startups, and one of the world’s leading research universities could require repeated reinvention.

Rae sees it slightly differently. “As long as you are curious and you seek to understand the business and the customers and the employees and the users, you can then apply the technology role to that,” she says.

“I always want to come and add value and leave a positive difference; leave somewhere better than I found it.”

When Rae arrived at Imperial, rather than pretending to understand the complexities of higher education, she sought out people who did.

She networked extensively across the university, learning from experienced higher education leaders and asking what she describes as plenty of questions: why does something operate in a particular way? What makes this sector different? Which rules, regulations, and relationships shape how the university works?

It was an approach she has already used years earlier when moving from Microsoft into BT.

“I did not know about how a telecoms network worked,” Rae says. “And so I had to learn. I had to understand, from the telephone exchange back to the core network, how does this all come together? How do you make a phone call?”

The technology has changed considerably since then, but her approach has not.

“The theme is probably just being curious and asking the questions.”

Putting the user back at the centre of IT

That curiosity also feeds into one of the defining principles of Rae’s leadership: product thinking.

Rae has long championed bringing product management practices into traditional IT organisations. Her focus is on delivering business value through technology rather than treating technology as an end in itself.

At its simplest, Rae says, the product approach means putting the user at the centre.

“One of the big things I’ve done in previous roles and I’ve done here at Imperial is drawing out the user journey, understanding what that experience, what that customer experience is.”

Within a university, these journeys are complex.

A prospective student may discover Imperial, apply, study and graduate before remaining connected to the institution for decades as an alumnus. They may later return for executive education, participate in the university community or donate towards scholarships.

Technology has a big role throughout that relationship, but delivering it requires more than just an IT department receiving requirements and completing projects.

Rae advocates outcomes-based roadmaps and cross-functional teams, bringing technology specialists together from elsewhere in an organisation and empowering those teams to solve problems.

“You help set the direction for them,” she says. “and then [have] that continuous learning and delivery.”

That shift also changes the conversations a CIO needs to have.

Rather than approaching senior stakeholders with service uptime percentages, incident volumes or other purely technical measures, Rae wants technology leaders discussing the outcomes that their colleagues care about.

“It’s talking about the revenue, the experience metrics, the employee satisfaction,” she explains. “It’s having the conversation at that level and actually talking about what the key challenges are for them.”

At Imperial, those individual priorities ultimately connect to the university’s wider Science for Humanity strategy and mission. In this case, technology can provide the thread connecting them.

“Technology is amazing. Technology really is differentiating for industry, and we’re seeing that with AI.”

Finding the right friction in an AI-enabled university

Few technologies demonstrate that tension better than generative AI.

For a research-intensive university like Imperial College with around 23,000 students and 9,000 staff, its implications extend considerably further than selecting a chatbot for faculty staff.

The questions encompass ethics, intellectual property, assessment, research, employee productivity, student experience, and the purpose of education itself.

For Rae, that means AI cannot simply become an IT initiative.

“I do believe it shouldn’t be something that the IT team controls,” she explains. “This isn’t a central thing for IT. I think it’s genuinely something for across the business.”

Technology’s responsibility is instead to make appropriate tools available and create the guardrails that allow people to use them safely. Imperial complements that with broader governance, including leadership oversight and working groups addressing areas such as education and professional services.

The distinction matters because the appropriate application of AI differs depending on who is using it and why. For students, there is an additional challenge.

Imperial needs to prepare graduates for a working world in which AI will be commonplace without allowing the technology to remove the very process through which students learn.

Rae compares it with sitting a maths exam. “You can put the answer down,” she says. “But the marks you get are when you show your working out.”

“So there’s a piece around, particularly in assessment and education: how do we use AI to help enhance our students’ experience but not take away from the learning?”

Building an AI environment around choice

Rae points to the university’s investment not only in accessible AI applications but also the infrastructure required to support AI and machine-learning research.

Imperial’s research computing function includes HX3, a high-performance computing environment established to support advanced research workloads.

For Rae, infrastructure such as this matters because AI adoption within a university cannot be reduced to giving everybody access to a single LLM.

Imperial has also been experimenting with tools including Google’s NotebookLM and has developed Daisy, through which students can access a range of models. That breadth is deliberate. “One tool doesn’t do all the job,” Rae says.

Someone synthesising large amounts of information has a very different requirement from a researcher modeling complex systems or a developer writing software. Coding teams may benefit from tools such as GitHub copilot while another user may simply want an LLM to help them interrogate information or improve a document.

Feedback from users demonstrated to Rae’s team that a portfolio approach was necessary. “We kind of started off with just a bit of an LLM focus,” she says, “and it became quite clear quite quickly that it needs to be more than that.”

Why the next generation needs to see technology differently

Rae’s belief in putting people first extends beyond her role at Imperial.

She has supported the HotTopics TechGirl community, including taking part in discussions designed to give young women greater exposure to technology leaders and careers.

Her motivation is personal: “I think back to where we started,” Rae says. “I saw the advert for a job at Microsoft and I didn’t think it was for me, because I didn’t think I really had what was needed for the tech industry. I was a little bit hesitant and I needed a little push.”

Had she not received it, her career would have looked entirely different. That experience has made Rae particularly conscious of reaching young people before assumptions about who belongs in technology become entrenched.

The issue was brought home more recently while accompanying her son as he selected his GCSE subjects. When they visited the computer science classroom, Rae looked around.

“It was mainly boys in there,” she said. “It just hit home, and it was like this still is an issue, right, in this day and age, so I was like, it's still an issue, so whatever I can do to help raise the profile and opportunities for girls pursuing tech careers.”

For Rae, widening participation also requires widening perceptions of what a technology career actually looks like. “This isn’t just something where you sit in the corner and code all day,” she says.

Nor does somebody need to have mapped out a technical career from childhood. Rae herself did not study a technology degree. She studied Business and Operations Management at Oxford Brookes University and later completed an MBA at Henley Business School.

“You can absolutely learn this stuff,” she says. “You can get hands on.”

“You can’t be what you can’t see”

Getting more women into technology, however, only solves one part of the problem.

Organisations need to start creating environments where they can build careers and see examples of people like themselves progressing into leadership.

Rae returns to a familiar phrase: “You can’t be what you can’t see.”

“There are some amazing women out there who are really championing and are amazing role models,” she says. “We just need to help make sure they are elevated and their story is told.”

The impact does not necessarily come through grand interventions.

Someone may read an interview. They may hear a podcast or see a video featuring somebody whose career challenges their assumptions about what a technology leader truly looks like.

“And [they] go, ‘Yeah, I can see that being me. I can do that too.’”

Quick fires

What was your dream job growing up?

A pilot.

What keeps you up at night?

Cyber.

What excites you about the next 12 months?

How we can actually apply AI to make a difference to our students and our employees at Imperial.

What do you do outside of work?

I love watching women’s football and watching my daughter play.

Best career advice?

Stay curious and ask questions.