"I am frankly not much excited by technology per se"

"'Computing' really wasn't something I would have wanted to do". Hampshire County Council head of IT talks to silicon.com about where he found the excitement from

"I didn't start out in IT at all but in the 1980s technology was beginning to take off and change how organisations actually worked. At that time organisations were looking for people who were, I guess, numerate and interested in technology to help make that transition."

Hampshire County Council head of IT, Jos Creese, has spent his entire career working in the public sector. Following a degree in maths and statistics, Creese fell into IT after starting out on a fast track government statistician programme with the Department of Health.

Creese worked first as a developer for an information centre for the NHS management board, then as a programmer for the British Medical Association.

"That was really the reason I got into IT in the first place. In fact, at university it wasn't my preferred route at all, 'computing' really wasn't something I would have wanted to do. What I think changed for me was that I could see the potential for technology to fundamentally change how organisations use data and information, which is where my background was, and that really did excite me," he told silicon.com.

After working with the DoH, Creese - who is also vice-president of local government IT professional body, Socitm made the move into IT management by joining Hampshire County Council.

"Hampshire County Council was well ahead in what it was doing with IT - they had an intranet even in the late 1980s and email was pretty widely used. They were doing some quite exciting stuff and I was quite taken with being part of that," he said.

Creese has remained with Hampshire County Council for more than two decades, bar a stint at Southampton City Council in the late 1990s.

He joined Southampton to migrate the council's IT services after it split from Hampshire County Council to become a unitary authority in its own right, following the local government shake-up at the time.

Creese then returned to Hampshire County Council as head of IT in 2002.

Despite heading up the council's IT function, Creese revealed that he is not interested in tech for tech's sake.

For Creese, his background in developing strategy and policy is more useful than his IT experience, allowing him to effectively communicate the potential and limitations of IT to the decision makers in the organisation.

"For me, IT is an opportunity to do things better and differently, not something that is exciting in itself. Although I'm unquestionably interested in the application of technology to solve problems, I am frankly not much excited by technology per se - I am not someone who would want to go home and tinker with a PC on a weekend, far from it," he said.

"I'm much more interested in what IT can do, especially for people, which is one of the reasons why the public sector has had great appeal," Creese added.

The appeal of the public sector can also be found in its diversity and complexity, according to the IT chief.

"We support schools, libraries, trading standards, treasury, museums, property services, procurement, social care, transport management, democratic services, and the usual corporate services as well as other councils and external organisations - the list just goes on. And somehow you have to put in place an IT infrastructure which is as generic and universal as it can be and yet, at the same time, reflects the valid differences between very different business areas."

Public sector work also brings with it the challenge of working in the public eye. "We work for the public through our politicians, supporting the implementation of policies and delivering best possible value from investment of taxes. And believe me, the level of public scrutiny, performance measurement and benchmarking of what we do is enormous," Creese explained.

Alongside the constant challenges of an incredibly diverse user base and public scrutiny, Creese must also grapple with...

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