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By Tim Ferguson, 9 March 2009 13:08

INTERVIEW

Audit Commission CIO Jeremy Boss hasn't always been a techie. Before taking up his previous role as head of IT at Imperial Tobacco Group, trained accountant Boss was working in risk management at Coopers and Lybrand.

A background combining auditing, accounting and technology is one that serves Boss well in his current role as CIO of the Audit Commission, a position he's held since 2004.

"I'm not an out and out technology person," he told silicon.com. "My skills are more around business strategy and alignment and project management and risk management, not so much the technical tech delivery - although in order to be credible you do need to be able to understand enough to ask all the right questions and know whether you're getting the sensible answer and value for money from either your suppliers or your internal team."

For Boss, however, the tech serves as a means to an end for the Commission. "It's not about technology, it's about: is this thing that you have to achieve [made] better or easier through the process," he said.

With the government spending on tech R&D and its Digital Britain plan to get 2Mbps broadband to every home in the country, Boss believes the role of the CIO will become increasingly important as the conduit to allow businesses to take advantage of the technology put at its disposal.

"I think the world is now increasingly more about collaboration, about sharing, about understanding how all these complicated things fit together and that's very much the skillset of a CIO," he added.

The integral role that the CIO plays in the business - coming into contact with everything from HR and finance to communications - is one of its plus points, according to Boss: "I think the future's pretty good actually because I think as CIO you're very privileged amongst your executive colleagues because you do genuinely get a very broad view across the whole of the business."

Boss' business comprises 2,800 staff and contractors based in 280 offices across England - and the CIO has to make sure that each and every one of them has access to flexible and reliable communications.

To that end, a year ago, the Commission saw the completion of a project to integrate its telephone, data and video networks. The overhaul resulted in a vast improvement in service quality and created annual savings of around £300,000.

The Commission's sustainability agenda also got a boost from the integration: it now has some 70 videoconferencing units around the country with 1,200 hours of use per month, helping the organisation cut down on travel and the carbon emissions that go with it.

Currently, Boss is also overseeing a revamp of the organisation's HR system and working on an information and assets management programme.

Another major project underway at the Audit Commission is the Comprehensive Area Assessment (CAA) project - a scheme which involves seven other inspectorates including Ofsted, HM Inspectorate of Prisons and the new Care Quality Commission.

The CAA will determine the quality of services such as education and health in a given area using the collective knowledge of local authorities as well as national inspectorates to rate the performance of councils and health and education services to create an accurate picture of the quality of provision.

"A big thing for the Audit Commission is how do we share our knowledge that we've developed with all the different sectors and bodies and how do we take that both to public sector professionals to help them improve what they do," Boss said.

"In a general sense, it's about saying we know lots of stuff about the world of public services [and] how do we manage that to the highest quality so that we can reuse both internally but also share it with everyone else across the sector that might have some value from it," Boss said.

The idea of reusing technology among public sector bodies is a particularly pressing one in light of the increasing interest that Boss sees from the taxpayer on how public money is spent and how government services are managed.

So how different is Boss' world from the private sector?

"Some of the challenges are different but the processes by which you identify them and do something about [it are the same]. Where there is a difference is priority setting and choices that are more complicated in the public sector," he told silicon.com.

"One of key things I've found in the Audit Commission is there's a real desire from the staff to make a difference to public services and that comes through very strongly as a sort of cultural trend and so it's really enabling that through the sensible use of technology," Boss added.