Ailsa Beaton, CIO, Metropolitan Police Service

Patrolling the mean streets of London on a Friday evening isn't where you would usually find a CIO but then not many CIOs get to experience front line service in the way the Metropolitan Police Service's director of information management Ailsa Beaton does.

Part of her role - in addition to the fairly standard set of CIO responsibilities in terms of the IT systems, voice comms and systems development - includes the application of technology into policing, and where better to get that insight than at the sharp end.

All the Met's employees are encouraged to volunteer as special constables and Beaton sets an example by donning her uniform and getting out on the street - and her beat often includes patrolling the streets of Brixton on a Friday night.

The Met spends around £300m per year on IT - most of it outsourced through a seven-year deal with Capgemini - and the force's technology supports just over 50,000 Met employees and includes just under 30,000 desktops, which are in the process of being upgraded to Windows XP.

The reason for going down the outsourcing route back in 2005 was principally about improving service levels - more resilience, faster break/fix times etc - with a secondary objective of saving money. It's an ongoing process but to date Beaton says the deal has led to some service improvements and £50m in savings.

Beaton says: "We're just coming towards the end of the final transition stage so we've made some cost reductions, some service improvements but we've still got some service improvements still to go to get to that kind of end state that we agreed with the user community. We're not through the transition but it's going well."

Information is another big part of Beaton's role at the Met and she has responsibility for managing the Met's work with the Information Commissioner, the Freedom of Information Act, Data Protection Act and information security. As of April this year she has also been handed responsibility for the information services that produce the Met's vital statistics on crime that are used for planning and public accountability.

But the main IT strategy is around giving the Met's officers and employees the information they need to do their work wherever they need it and as quickly as possible. A key theme around this is mobility, with a project to roll out HTC PDA devices to officers in autumn this year, while the Met's executive users already have BlackBerry devices to keep them connected.

The other key strand is creating a portal for the Met's employees to access information and systems more easily.

Beaton says: "Like a lot of organisations historically we've got a lot of application silos. So to do any one particular process you might need to dip in and out of several different systems, so producing the portal that sits across that is a crucial piece."

Innovation isn't a big theme at an organisation like the Met but Beaton does have an emerging technologies team keeping track of any significant developments out in the market.

She says: "There are many areas where we have no need to be at the bleeding edge of technology. Our office systems do not need to be bleeding-edge technology but if we're doing crime prevention or detection or work like that and there's a piece of technology that's just come out that is going to make a real difference to us, then that kind of technology is important. And if there's a new technology that comes out that makes a new kind of criminality possible, that's very important to us."

As a member of the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo), Beaton is involved with the National Police Improvement Agency on the big national police IT projects, such as the new police national database, which will replace the ageing Police National Computer (PNC) system.

Beaton says the new national database, which is due to be ready by 2014, will be much more intelligence-based. She explains: "The PNC is very much geared up to 'have you ever heard of Ailsa Beaton? Has she ever been convicted of a crime? Has she ever been in prison?' as opposed to 'do we have any suspicions about Ailsa Beaton's activity?', and the police national database will take us more into that intelligence, which starts to help prevention work more."

Beaton's role as CIO of the UK's biggest police force is a far cry from where she started out in a university chemistry lab. After finishing that degree she didn't fancy spending her career in a lab and so her path into IT started with a stint in accountancy first.

"Two years into it I'd ended up being responsible for the computerisation of the whole of the finance department, which we were doing with GE. GE offered me the chance to move to them and I did find the IT aspects of my job more interesting than the accounting aspects of my job, which is how I got into it," she says.

From her first IT role in GE Beaton took a promotion from the technical user support area into sales and marketing, specialising in the oil industry where she spent a year running GE's office in Stavanger, Norway.

The next step was consultancy and Beaton joined PA Consulting as a financial and global trading systems specialist and spent 11 years there, rising to become senior partner responsible for IT consulting in the public and healthcare sectors. It was this which gave Beaton a taste for the CIO role.

"What I enjoyed most was working with my clients rather than the internal administration of being part of the management team of a consulting business. I therefore wanted to move into a CIO role rather than keep going into the consultancy path and by this time I'd done a lot of very significant business change programmes."

Her first CIO job was at IT supplier ICL, where she stayed for three years before joining the Met in 2000.

Beaton's biggest achievement at the Met to date is the C3i project to re-engineer the emergency and non-emergency call handling service, which was completed last autumn.

"We took 32 control rooms, five non-emergency call handling centres and one emergency call handling centre and put them into three new buildings and re-engineered the process and technology and the like."

Outside of the Met, Beaton is kept busy by her Acpo responsibilities and she's also involved with the British Computer Society and the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists, but she does find time to work on renovating a house she owns high up in the Pyrenees.

As to the future, Beaton predicts that information, not just technology, and a broad business understanding will become increasingly important for CIOs.

She says: "I think the role of the CIO is to be part of the business team and then lead that ICT part of the organisation to meet what the business needs. It's extremely helpful to understand functions like finance and sales and marketing and not just have the IT background."