Met Police attempts to entice candidates for CIO role with £200,000 salary

CIO will have a huge challenge on their hands as Met Police has continually been criticised for its approach to IT

The Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) is trying to entice candidates to apply for the chief information officer vacancy by offering a salary of up to £200,000.

The role was left vacant after Richard Thwaite's interim contract came to an end, and he was replaced in the short term by John Lowry.

In an advert posted on the Met Police website, the organisation said that the "highly influential role will be fundamentally important to shaping the future strategies and operational policing of the MPS".

The successful candidate will have to guide "digital policing" through a major transformation programme, it said, and will have to ensure that the Met Police's combination of in-house and external managed functions "delivers robust, high-performing and innovative ICT services, while delivering true value for money from budgets and investments".

According to the MPS, the CIO should have significant and in-depth experience of running and managing an IT function as a member of senior management, and they will also have developed an IT strategy for large organisations of a similar scale and/or complexity, successfully leading IT teams through major change.

A minimum of an undergraduate degree in IT or a related area, as well as IT industry accreditation(s) are necessary to apply for the role, for which the selected candidate will earn between £152,915 and £197,133 - plus an additional £3,501 location allowance.

Whoever does take up the role will have a huge challenge on their hands. The MPS has been criticised heavily for its approach to IT in the past few years, particularly by the London Assembly's Budget and Performance Committee. In the committee's investigation into how the Met could improve its spending on technology, it found that up to 30,000 new mobile devices to be distributed to officers could end up as "costly paperweights". It also found that many officers were still using desktop PCs that took more than half an hour to boot.

Since then, the MPS unveiled a new Total Technology strategy, aimed at transforming crime fighting in London. The strategy, which runs until 2017, will incorporate a £200m investment over three years, and at the time MPS claimed that it would enable ongoing IT costs to be cut by 30 per cent.

In March, MPS revealed that it was looking to outsource its software development capabilities in a plan that will see just 100 staff retained out of a current workforce of 800 - this at a time when a large number of organisations are looking to bring software development in-house.

Two days ago, a report detailed how the Met Police is still using Windows XP on over 35,000 of its desktops and laptops. However, the organisation told Computing that it has requested a 12-month custom support agreement with Microsoft as it looks to switch to Windows 8.1.