Vodafone CIO to become HMRC's chief digital and information officer

Mark Dearnley to take control of £200m, three-year digitisation programme

Mark Dearnley, CIO at Vodafone, is to become HM Revenue & Customs' (HMRC) new chief digital and information officer.

Dearnley will start his new role in October and take control of HMRC's £200m three-year digitisation programme, as well as helping to deliver online services for all taxpayers. He will also lead HMRC's physical, personnel and information security.

The digitisation programme, announced in June, aims to cut the number of paper filings and phone calls taxpayers have to make to HMRC in a bid to save about £50m annually in administrative costs.

Dearnley has been CIO at Vodafone UK since 2010, leading a programme to overhaul Vodafone's business-critical information systems, as well as restructuring Vodafone's IT operating model and introducing cloud-based technologies into the mobile operator.

HMRC said he was recruited through a fair and open competition process, with consultation from the government's chief operating officer, Stephen Kelly, and approval from the Prime Minister, David Cameron.

Prior to Vodafone, Dearnley spent six years at Cable & Wireless (C&W) as CIO and in other senior IT roles. He has also had stints as chief operating officer at Boots.com and been a programme director at Boots.

The former C&W CIO, who will earn £180,000 a year in his new role, said he was attracted by the customer base, scale and complexity of HMRC, which made the new role "irresistible".

"I am thrilled to have been appointed and can't wait to get started," he said.

HMRC's outgoing CIO, Mark Hall, recently told Computing that the government department already has 200 online services targeted at business customers, but that it is looking to digitise more of its services.

"[The online services available] are things like VAT, for example, or they are targeting things like self-assessment. Our ambition is to consolidate them even further and start to look at individual and personal taxpayers in the next wave of digitisation," he said.