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By Natasha Lomas, 4 February 2009 14:55

INTERVIEW

...the size of the budget has been reduced by £50m - to bring costs back in line with original projections. "It's like all these things, the base lines change as you go through but certainly over the last two years we've been looking at trying to reduce the overall budget in terms of how we deploy it and what we deploy," he said.

The FCO CIO added: "When I joined, the programme wasn't in the right place and that's because of a number of issues in terms of how we were with our partner. We've reset those over the last year, done some redesign work and we're now in the process of actually getting it out there."

Asked why so many government IT projects end up significantly over budget, and whether there is pressure to set unrealistically low budgets at the start of projects, Mather said: "I think there's some of that, which is perhaps the diligence in terms of setting projects up at the start… The thing I've always found is, if a project's going to fail, make sure it fails fast - I think there's less of that. We sometimes persevere too long."

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But the sheer size of government IT projects can be a problem too: "Some of these projects are huge - if you look at the scale of them they outweigh completely anything the private sector would even attempt. That again is a piece that we need to learn about - making sure something's not just too big.

"Some things have to be - if you're looking at those major cross-departmental pieces but I think where we can we should make sure they're in reasonable chunks. That'll mean that we can get them delivered quicker and make sure we can start realising the benefit quicker and they'll become more manageable."

The private sector is also not under the same obligations to reveal its failures, he added: "It's a lot easier for the private sector to hide those things away."

FCO posts in Athens and The Hague are now up and running on Future Firecrest - and Mather claims they are seeing some of the benefits already. In a year he predicts the FCO will have a workforce which "can choose where they work and how they work".

"The biggest challenge I face is not about deploying technology, it's about actually saying to 16,000 people we can do things differently now, and really starting to drive that - embracing the opportunity," he said.

Mather adds: "We're using Vista and Microsoft Office, we're not complex in that way as an organisation but when we apply those we're trying to say, 'OK, can we enable laptop ambassadors? Can they be the ones that cover the region by working in a virtual and mobile way? Can we use technology to drive forward e-diplomacy? How do we engage with the people that we need to - the non-governmental organisations like Red Cross and faith groups, using technology so we can collaborate with them in a safe way?"

In addition to his day to day responsibilities at the FCO, Mather sits on the government's CIO Council - which he says gives him a fresh perspective.

"It's an opportunity for the government CIOs to look at those non-departmental specific issues. It's really starting to drive that cross-government agenda... so we shouldn't just be speaking about things that are just affecting ourselves - it should be about the common good."

The common good is clearly a bit of a theme for Mather. Asked what he loves and hates about technology, he said: "The thing I love is the impact - the real impact. The thing I hate is when people become too fascinated by particular bits of technology…

"People who are completely fixated by technology will give you a Sistine Chapel even if you only need a shed and that's where IT as an industry has to become better. We'll earn a lot more respect from the business if we start coming up with those decisions and even just creating those options because we too often get carried away with our own technology."