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By Natasha Lomas, 4 February 2009 14:55

INTERVIEW

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) started life in the aftermath of the American War of Independence - with the first UK Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs being appointed in 1782. Purpose-built offices came a little later, in 1868, but, as government departments go, the FCO is more imposing edifice than new kid on the block.

Its CIO however is a relative newcomer: Tony Mather has been in the job for just over a year and a half.

Mather holds an engineering degree - but chose to go into IT instead, where he started his career as a trainee programmer and worked his way up through an assortment of tech jobs.

He also brings an outsider's perspective - being hired in from the private sector, where he has worked for Pepsi, among others.

"There's recently been a drive to get people who have experience in IT to do [senior public sector IT] roles because previously they were manned by generalists," he told silicon.com. Now, according to Mather, there's an increasing understanding in government of the need for such roles to be filled by individuals from within the IT profession.

While Mather says he believes many of the issues faced by public and private sector CIOs are "often the same", there are aspects of the public sector role that sets it apart and can make it more challenging - including the procurement process.

"You've got quite an overhead in terms of what you have to go through and it's again something that's affected some of the decisions I've been able to take within the FCO - that I would have had many more options open to me had I been in the private sector," he said.

"I understand the intentions around which [procurement rules are] set up and a lot of those are Europe-based but there's also some downsides in terms of what they mean, and that often can be in terms of time to actually do things. I'm also concerned about how much cost it puts back into industry, which is only going to come back to the customer in the long run."

There's also the legacy point - not simply ageing technology but entrenched mindsets that can impede change. "Most Plcs are dealing with a 50-year-old culture when it comes to things they want to change," he explains. "Government's had a lot longer."

In the FCO's case, there is some 200 years of culture to consider. As its first CIO, Mather is the man tasked with coaxing what he describes as an 'if you're not at your desk you're not working' mindset into a modern era of tech-fuelled mobile working. Such a task may go some way to explain the brand of work phone in pocket.

"I don't have a BlackBerry - I have an iPhone," he told silicon.com.

The project that will ultimately enable new ways of working for the FCO's 16,000 staff is called Future Firecrest, which entails replacing all desktop and back-end tech in the department's many offices around the world - from Paris and Washington to Lashkagar in Helmand Province, Afghanistan.

"It will enable us to work in ways that we've never worked before," Mather said, "and allow people to be much more mobile. They can work as collaborative virtual teams and start to get some of that balance in terms of work/life which we've never had before, so that's hugely powerful for us an organisation."

"We've kind of coined a phrase to try and drive that - it's about 'more foreign, less office'."

And even as it rolls out Future Firecrest, the FCO has been dabbling with new ways of working - Mather cites an "experiment" carried out last year called Unclassified Embassy in which three diplomatic posts went 'off grid' to see what could be learned in the process.

"We took three of our posts completely off our system and we gave them big rules about be careful with data, be careful with personal information but see which things work: go on BlackBerry, go off system solutions and learn. Find the bits that work and find the bits that don't work and we can then start building those in to what we do," he added.

The flagship Future Firecrest project, meanwhile, is currently ahead of its original 2012 completion schedule, according to Mather, who expects the new tech to be deployed to the majority of diplomatic posts by the end of this year, with the rest being kitted out in early 2010.

Asked how the FCO has managed to get ahead of schedule, Mather said: "I think management of risk is a key part in that. I think in the past we perhaps abdicated too much of that risk to our partner and that drives its own consequences in terms of behaviour. That's something I took back in terms of, at the end of the day, I make the decisions around risk on behalf of the FCO and that has - in a risk management way - allowed us to decide which we can go quicker on, which we need to hold back on."

However, in July last year the FCO admitted the cost of the project had risen £26m over its original £332m budget, and in November a parliamentary written response by the department suggested the budget had risen even more - to £401m, or £69m more than the first projection.

However, Mather also revealed...

Click here to read page 2 of the interview.