Civil Service appoints its first CEO

John Manzoni's remit is to embed digital reform in government

Does a track record in gas make him the perfect candidate?

The Civil Service has appointed its first chief executive, John Manzoni, who has been running the Major Projects Authority within Whitehall for the past eight months.

The appointment has a technology focus, with the brief to make Whitehall's administration “more digital” – one of four tasks outlined by Civil Service head Sir Jeremy Heywood in his report on reform of the service, published yesterday.

As well as making “digital a mainstream task of the Civil Service”, Manzoni's brief is to ensure that the Service is “digital all the way through, including the way [it does] policy”, in the words of the report.

Two years ago, Maude said that he wanted to run the Government “more like a business”. With Manzoni – former CEO of BP Downstream and of Canadian energy firm Talisman – he may have found the man to do it.

The second of Manzoni's major tasks will be to reform the Civil Service's commercial contracts management ability, an area that Heywood acknowledges has been its “Achilles' heel”.

With numerous government IT contracts ending or up for renewal over the next 18 months, Whitehall has a small window of opportunity to avoid being locked into long-term, "big ticket" outsourcing deals of the type that have been a millstone on many projects.

In this regard, the Civil Service has long been seen as an obstacle, rather than an enabler. For example, when the G-Cloud – a modest success for the Coalition – was moved under the umbrella of the Government Digital Service, its profile was severely diminished at a time when it should have been raised.

But there is a problem: the General Election in May 2015 falls right in the middle of the 18-month period of contract closures or renewals. Any change of administration might see government IT buyers defaulting to old procurement methods in the interests of continuity and simplicity.

Mazoni's appointment is clearly designed to ensure that progress on IT reform isn't lost and that the government's determination to be “more digital” in the way that it buys, deploys and uses technology is more than just a policy aim.

Reinforcing the government's digital strategy is confirmation that its CTO, Liam Maxwell, plans to stay in his role until 2018.

Implicit in the plan to embed reform of IT procurement into the Civil Service is the influence of a party politician, not an administrator: Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude, whose drive to modernise government procurement and throw open the door to smaller IT suppliers has been a consistent theme of this Parliament.

Two years ago, Maude said that he wanted to run the government “more like a business”. With Manzoni – former CEO of BP Downstream and of Canadian energy firm Talisman – he may have found the man to do it.

"I’ve spent a lifetime in big, complex global organisations,” said Manzoni. “In particular, I’ve seen organisations go through transformations into functional structures – which is underneath a lot of this [Civil Service] reform plan.

"A lot of the statements that are being made in the Civil Service context are the same conversations that I’ve been having in a private sector context in these large organisations – so I’ve spent my life doing some of the things that are crying out to be done."

But Manzoni's appointment has already caused a stir. His track record in the oil industry has come under scrutiny, especially his tenure at BP during a 2005 Texas oil refinery explosion, which killed 15 people, and his time at Talisman, which has been involved with fracking.