Australia’s top CIOs celebrated at CIO50 2025

Australia’s most impactful technology leaders and their teams, along with the country’s leading cybersecurity executives, were honoured at the joint CIO50 and CSO30 Awards on Tuesday night.

Chief Information Officer for Village Roadshow, Arul Arogyanathan, took out the CIO50 top spot and was crowned CIO of the Year. Having held the CIO role at the theme parks and entertainment giant for the past four years, Arogyanathan was recognised by the CIO50 judging panel for the significant impact he has made in AI enablement and stakeholder engagement.

Ranked No. 2 in this year’s CIO50 list is Sinan Erbay, who was until recently the Chief Information Officer at RMIT University. Erbay, spent a decade leading technology at the university. He was selected for moving beyond AI pilots to an embedded, enterprise-wide approach delivering impressive results for students, academics, and the university’s wider staff.

Coming in No. 3 on the 2025 CIO50 list is Andrew Dome, Chief Digital Information Officer at aged care provider Uniting. Under Dome’s leadership, the organisation has rolled out Buddy, a GenAI assistant for care workers that has saved the organisation millions of dollars in time and eased the administrative burden on staff.

The rest of the top 10 in the CIO50 included Miranda Ratajski of Westpac, Chris Johnson of Southern Cross Austereo, Brett Reedman of Catholic Healthcare, John Vohradsky of IRT Group, Stevie-Ann Dovico of Beyond Bank, Tom Gao of City of Sydney, and Noel Toal for his work at DPV Health.

Meanwhile, emerging ICT leaders were recognised in the Next CIO category, which highlights rising stars on the pathway to senior leadership. The Next CIO winner is an individual who is exceeding expectations and driving innovation within their organisation.

The 2025 winner of the Next CIO Award was Victor Rahman, Head of IT at Atturra. Rahman has been instrumental in the organisation’s redesign of service delivery, ERP upgrade, and scalability improvements.

CIO50 Team of the Year Awards

Four organisations were also presented with Team of the Year awards. This category recognises technology teams that are building and sustaining strong team cultures, delivering customer value, successfully executing business transformation, and innovating through strategic use of emerging technologies.

Culture & Inclusion

This award recognises technology teams creating an internal culture that inspires individual growth and allows teams to achieve personal and professional goals. Culture can include increasing diversity, celebrating team wins, mentoring staff, and more.

Finalists in the Culture & Inclusion category were Hume Rural Health Alliance, ProbeCX, Qantas Loyalty, and Victoria University.

Victoria University’s Digital & Campus Services team won the award for uniting IT Services and Facilities into one cohesive team. By launching the Future Leaders and Graduate Programs and embedding a cultural behaviours framework, they’ve built a people-first workplace that fosters innovation and drives success.

Customer Value

This award recognises technology teams delivering increased customer value and experience through refreshed approaches to user engagement, spanning new projects, solutions, initiatives, processes, business models, and operations.

Finalists included City of Sydney, Corporate Travel Management, iCare, ProbeCX, Restive, and VicRoads.

The Team of the Year – Customer Value award went to VicRoads, which pioneered one of the first large-scale passkey deployments in the global public sector. This initiative quickly transformed the customer experience, with over one million passkeys created in three months, saving users 15,000 days annually, reducing frustration, and boosting security.

Transformation

This award celebrates organisations that have successfully planned and executed business transformation initiatives by leveraging digital and disruptive technologies, strategically integrating innovations to deliver outstanding outcomes aligned with broader business goals.

Finalists were Aware Super, Astellas Pharma, BAE Systems, Catholic Healthcare, HBF Health, and Metro Trains Sydney.

BAE Systems Australia won the Transformation category for driving a business-led digital strategy that enhances the employee experience for 6,500 staff working on national security programs. Emphasising cultural and digital transformation with a focus on business value, BAE successfully implemented initiatives across six strategic pillars: flexible architecture, business enablement, productivity and automation, digital experience, secure foundations, and a data-driven enterprise.

Innovation in Emerging Tech

This award recognises teams driving bold innovation through the strategic use of emerging technologies to transform their organisation and lead industry change, delivering real and measurable impact.

Finalists were City of Sydney, Corporate Travel Management, and TLC Healthcare.

TLC Healthcare won the Innovation category for creating the world’s first fully integrated AI- and biometric-enabled medication ecosystem. Replacing the traditional medication trolley, the new model delivers a secure, seamless, digitally enabled experience that improves clinical outcomes and puts people at the centre of care.

The CIO50 Australia Awards are part of Foundry’s global awards program and are judged by an independent panel of former CIO50 winners, industry analysts, and Foundry’s global editors.

CIO Australia congratulates all the winners and finalists in this year’s CIO50 Awards.