Suffolk looks back on his time as government CIO

Says he wants to make way for new staff with new ideas, policies and processes

Government CIO John Suffolk has used his blog to shed a little more light on the reasons behind his decision to stand down, and offer his vision of government ICT going forward.

Cabinet secretary Gus O Donnell announced Suffolk's departure last Thursday.

In a statement Suffolk said: "It has been a great honour to have been a civil servant and a huge privilege to have led the IT profession over the last five years. Without doubt we have transformed the UK into a leading user of technology benefiting citizens and the UK economy."

In his blog, Suffolk sums up some of the key themes of his tenure, although he gives no indication as to whether he expects these to remain central to government IT policy.

The themes include the rationalisation of infrastructures to create a cloud model; continued sharing of assets and systems; the continued drive to benchmark and drive operational excellence; the putting of more systems online - but based around horizontal citizen and business needs; focusing more on SMEs; reducing the scale of projects; fixing procurement processes and finally putting technology at the heart of the next transformation.

On his decision to move on, he writes: "I am a great believer in renewal and as new teams enter a business, or as in our case, Government, it is important that they themselves can bring in new ideas, new policies and processes, and crucially new people. Having achieved what I set out to achieve it is time for me to get out of the way and allow fresh thinking and impetus to drive forward the strategy."