The Government CIO is head of profession for ICT enabled business change and Information Security & Assurance. His team lead the public sector in the design, approval and delivery of the overall ICT Strategy and its supporting elements. Work is allocated to departmental CIOs and the Office of HM Government CIO & SIRO (OGCIO) support, facilitate and ensure delivery. Cabinet Office ensures alignment of all policy and strategies and that they can be delivered in a cohesive way. Delivery is through the CIO Councils (and subordinate organisations in Health, Police and Local Government) and the CIOs in departments and public sector bodies.
In the OGCIO a highly leveraged model is in place, of a small central support team facilitating local delivery. For instance, for Green ICT, one Cabinet Office official supports a lead CIO from a department who leads this work on behalf of CIO council. In the instance of Greening Government ICT, a further 86 individuals are active in developing the strategy and associated action plans. Cabinet Office supports, facilitates, mobilise and motivate resources, ensure cohesion and compliance with other strategies and remove roadblocks. OGCIO also works across government on security, identity management, Digital Britain, run the GSi infrastructure for 500,000 public servants and 450 organisations as well as lead on shared services.
The level of commitment from the public sector to delivery of the ICT strategy and its associated elements is evident from the resources made available to Cabinet Office to support delivery of individual programmes of work. These resources are often delivering public sector activity in addition to their local accountabilities and objectives.
Seems highly leveraged here means “under resourced”
> The Government CIO is head of profession for ICT enabled business change and Information Security & Assurance.
I never quite understand what he actually takes responsibility for. It’s clearly not for any of the actual data losses we have witnessed, for example, but nor for creating the circumstances in which such an extraordinary series of losses of personal data were possible.
> Cabinet Office ensures alignment of all policy and strategies and that they can be delivered in a cohesive way.
Is that aspirational, or meant to be a statement of fact?
> OGCIO also works across government on security, identity management…
Who will hold their hand up and take responsibility for the fact we dont have a credible and contempory online ID and authentication strategy?
Cabinet Office has always fudged this in its IT strategies because the Home Office/IPS ID Scheme is meant to be the “gold standard” around which all other ID schemes converge.
But it doesnt work online.
This is, to put it mildly, a problem for an ICT strategy which is meant to support massive cross-government savings. Tell everyone to go online, then fingerprint them and issue them ID Cards which can only be verified offline, and then by “visual inspection”.
That’s the dysfunctional legacy of five years of groupthink and fudge. It takes brazen mandarinese to present this as coherent, credible or efficient.
What has the CIO council delivered? What has the CIO delivered?
There are so many words here that seem to have been lifted from papers since the late 1990s – take a look at some of them in the Cabinet Office archives.
£120bn later and here we are with nothing to show for it. Point out to me where that £120bn has gone and what has been achieved ….