IT chief John Suffolk may have taken a hands-off and inclusive approach to the development of his profession, but Ruth Keeling discovers that his attitude is not entirely laissez faire
The key to the government IT profession’s work, says chief information officer John Suffolk (pictured above), is its devolved structure: instead of him and his Cabinet Office team issuing diktats, he relies on a number of “leads” – on issues ranging from better procurement to skills – based across central government and beyond.
He describes this as a “high leverage model” that makes best use of a small central team –indeed, the team has shrunk in the four years since the professional group was first established to provide support for the IT professionals who are pushing the various agendas. “The more resources you have in the centre, the more you do things for departments that, really, departments should be doing themselves," Suffolk explains.
For example, there is an ecosystem of about 200 people out in the public sector focused on the IT professionalisation programme, he says. Another example is green IT: there are now 86 people working on the agenda, led by Chris Chance, the former chief information officer (CIO) for the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs – who now runs the Olympic IT programme.
“From one person, you see how it spans out to all parts of the organisation and then it becomes theirs, not ours,” Suffolk says. “If I had planned to get 86 people [to work on green IT], do you reckon I would have been successful? No, absolutely not.” Instead of dictating that particular individuals should be involved, and that progress should go in a particular direction, “you’ve just got to let it happen”, he adds.
By inviting anyone and everyone to get involved, “suddenly you find that you have hugely capable, talented people driving an agenda forward that they are immensely passionate about,” he explains. “You can’t design that.” And that’s why a small team at the centre is best, he finishes: “Otherwise we’d be poking our nose in where it really isn’t wanted.”
The IT profession was established in late 2005, in the wake of the transformational government strategy. That paper set out how technology could transform public services, but stipulated that government IT professionals must have the right skills and capabilities.
In the years since, the profession has worked to improve its skills base. Suffolk’s team has adopted the Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA) competency model, and individuals are scored against it in order to provide departments with information on their own capabilities.
Suffolk’s team is also closely involved in recruitment. Suffolk himself is involved with the appointment of CIOs for each department, and he argues that the success of the new system is seen in the fact that, of all the appointments made in the last two years, only two have since left the civil service.
The team also operates a more informal service, matching departments’ skills needs with IT professionals who may be coming to the end of their time on a project elsewhere. One aim is to reduce the long-term dependence on interims – Suffolk believes that if an interim is still in place after 12 months, there is probably a skills gap that needs to be filled permanently.
Recently, Suffolk and his network of leads – which includes a CIOs’ council and a chief technology officers’ (CTO) council – has been working hard on the government’s new ICT strategy, published in January, which promises to save government £3.2bn a year. One of the central aims of the strategy is a reduction in duplication of effort: the multiple purchases or design of ever-so-slightly different products by different parts of the public sector.
For example, last month the CIO council announced that the children’s database Contact Point, which has tight security controls governing access, is the “champion asset” when it comes to employee authentication. That means, explains Suffolk, that if a department, local authority or public body needs an authentication system, it should look first and foremost at Contact Point. And while Suffolk is happy to let go when it comes to developing ideas, strategies and direction, he is not content to allow public bodies to deviate once that work has been agreed by him and the CIO or CTO councils. “We will actually go into a department and intervene,” he says, “because we have signed up that this is the way we’re going to do it”.
It might seem a draconian approach, but Suffolk says it is about saving money and minimising risk. If you know something already works, why risk creating a new failure? Developing new systems requires “tremendous amounts of learning and knowledge and experience and pain, and I don’t want that to be wasted because someone goes and reinvents the wheel”, says Suffolk. “They will just go through the same knowledge and learning and experience and pain. That is not the way we want to spend our money.”