Government will regret 'demonising CIO role', says former HMRC CIO

Phil Pavitt doesn't believe a CDO can run the IT of central government

The government will regret "demonising" the CIO role in the long term, according to former HMRC CIO, Phil Pavitt.

The CIO role was axed from central government after Andy Nelson left in February 2013 to work for the Department for Work and Pensions. Former deputy CIO Liam Maxwell was made CTO in December 2012, and the government continued its IT shake-up by hiring its first deputy CTO, Magnus Falk, in August last year.

Other high-profile appointments followed, with Mike Bracken named as the first ever government chief data officer last month, and Conall Bullock, being named as chief digital officer. The government said that Bullock would take over the previously separate duties of CTO, CIO and chief digital officer.

But Pavitt, who was speaking exclusively to Computing in Whiteley, where he takes up his role as global CIO of Specsavers, believes that this approach will come back to haunt the government.

"I think the government's anti-CIO approach in which the role of the CIO has been demonised by government and by Maude's team, [is something that it] will deeply regret looking back, because IT is what can make government more efficient," he suggested.

Pavitt said that he didn't understand the government's stance on the CIO role because it tended to follow the commercial world in which CIOs are still a mainstay.

"Maybe in the commercial world, CIOs are a bit nervous about digital officers, and in some cases they have been downgraded from board positions to reporting to someone on the board, so maybe it is a slight weakening of the role - although that is not true at Specsavers," he said.

"But there is almost always a CIO in commercial organisations, so if [commercial organisations] see a value in that and government - who are in a worse position than commercial organisations - don't, then where is the arrogance in that?

"Their answer is because they want to make them chief digital officers (CDOs) - right, but who is going to run that stuff every day? Who is going to make sure that this huge government machine produces the goods every day? The CDO? Really? I don't think so. I think they missed a whole organisational design trick," he said.