“Technology is absolutely central to what we do, there is no service within the council that could function effectively without access to technology,” says Jos Creese, chief information officer (CIO) for Hampshire County Council.

As an organisation with an annual budget ­ £1.3 bn ­ significantly in excess of the turnover of most UK companies, it seems reasonable to accept Creese’s word when he emphasises the similar imperatives driving CIOs in both the public and private sectors.

“I can see no real differences in the changing role between public and private sectors. The issues faced by organisations are universal, from simply managing operational IT to ensuring investment in technology delivers the highest possible value to an organisation,” he says.

“In practice it means that your CIO needs to be seen as someone who is competent at facilitating change and can help secure innovation and lateral thinking at board level.

“It also means they can be relied upon to ensure that highly effective technology performance happens as it should, with as much reliability as possible ­ if you don’t have that reliability, the debate inevitably gets dragged back down to ‘why doesn’t my printer work, why’s the network falling over, why isn’t the email working’, whatever it might be. Now only a minority of my time is spent on technical infrastructure work, whereas 10 years ago it would probably have been the majority of my working week.”

Looking ahead to how his role will change over the coming years, Creese is not anticipating anything more seismic than he has already seen. “I’m not sure that over the next few years the time I spend on operational IT will reduce dramatically. It will change, but it is already a small proportion of what I do and I would be slightly concerned if it dwindled to a level where I became remote from it,” he says.

The greatest change will come, Creese suggests, in partnership working with o ther local authorities and private service providers, placing the onus on him to provide operational platforms that enable joint working and information sharing. It’s the kind of combination of IT and business processes that should ensure technology leaders such as Creese, who are well versed in business strategies, are also able to nail down their seat as CIO among the rest of an organisation’s leadership for some time to come.