Agenda Setters: Where are they now... Roger Cole

With silicon.com's exclusive Agenda Setters poll rearing its head again later this month, it is time to look back at those individuals who held top 10 positions in 2003. Here we appraise the big surprise of last year.

Roger Cole is hardly a household name. In fact many people in tech, or generally in the business world, would still have trouble saying what he does.

All the more surprising then that last year he placed at number six on our poll of high tech's most influential individuals.

Cole, to dig up his official titles of 12 months ago, was chairman of the Risk Management Group of the Basel Committee and - for his day job, since the late 1970s - associate director, US Federal Reserve Board. In fact he still is those things.

So, given the importance of the Basel II accord on banks and the resultant moves many prominent buyers and suppliers of IT have had to make, maybe we shouldn't raise a collective eyebrow too quickly.

Though that's not to say Cole will make it again this year.

Cole was clearly something of a symbol. His place in our list marked the third in several legs that neatly sum up recent years of tech. First we recorded the rise of star Wall Street analysts such as Mark Meeker and Henry Blodget. Then came the backlash and so the enforcer, the man who silicon.com's panel of experts identified relatively early as an agenda setter, New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer. And then there was the reformer, in the case of last year Basel II's Cole.

Talk this year is potentially of senators Paul Sarbanes and Michael Oxley, representing an even better known crackdown, making the grade. We'll see.

silicon.com's Agenda Setters panel, made up again of CIOs, analysts, VCs, consultants, lawyers, academics and other experts, will be convening this September at our London offices with our results revealed at the end of that month. If you want to pass on your comments for our experts, about Roger Cole or any other contender, drop us an email at editorial@silicon.com.