From army officer to IT chief - CPS CIO David Jones

For David Jones, the role of CIO at the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) is something of a departure: for the majority of his career, Jones has been an army officer.

Before joining the CPS 14 months ago, Jones was more used to dealing with the rigours of military life than the rigours of heading up an IT function within the civil service.

The two are more similar than you might imagine, he told silicon.com.

"For planning and execution in a military environment, you need to have expertise but you also need to understand where the business is going in the loosest terms, whether that's a military mission or a private sector business or any element of the public sector.

"The alignment between the skillsets - knowing what information is needed by whom by when for what purpose - is something ingrained in me as a background from doing my work in the military," he said.

While the military has a huge number of "moving parts" according to Jones, the CPS is no slouch either: more than 9,000 staff across more than 600 sites. It also has to shepherd information as it moves through a number of other organisations, from the police to defence lawyers.

It's these bodies that in some ways have to determine the CPS' tech strategy: no one body can move ahead of the others in terms of IT, in order to ensure that the transit of information between them is a smooth one.

"The biggest challenge is getting information from the police, who own it in investigatory terms, then moving it through our processes then offering it out to the defence and others. Again, this is similar to a military context. We have no control over the defence and nor should we, so their technology baseline is what they decide it to be… we've got to be able to cope with that," he said.

It's a challenge that looks set to present itself even more often as an increasing amount of evidence - CCTV footage, for example - comes in a digital-only format.

It's a challenge that's pushing the CPS to consider an all-electronic case file, trials of which are already being planned.

Whether an electronic file could become the standard is a question the CPS will be debating this month.

"We're trying to take that step down the lane to effectively the beginnings of the electronic case… I don't know the answer to whether the business wants to go the whole distance to where the electronic file is the record, or whether for next five years it will still be secondary to the eventual paper and exhibit file as being the record. It's an interesting debate because there are as many cultural issues and partner issues as there are technology issues," Jones said.

Information sharing is also front of mind as the CPS considers the fate of the 10-year PFI (private finance initiative) that gave rise to the Compass case management system now used by the organisation to process more than a million cases per year.

"PFIs in IT environments have got some pretty hard reporting, to the extent I'm led to believe that people don't like them for a future model," Jones said. However, the CPS' PFI has "delivered to performance, time and cost".

"[It] fundamentally hits all buttons as far as I'm concerned. It's a successful PFI agreement, well thought through and well-executed in my opinion. It's taken an organisation that was pretty bereft of any form of complex information systems and turned it into an organisation which has got this million-case-a-year application, it's core to the business process and now we're looking to go to electronic files and the like."

When Jones says 'pretty bereft', he's not exaggerating. Some CPS staff didn't have PCs back in 2001 and as recently as 2002 the CPS wasn't in a networked environment.

Now, however, a networks programme is bringing the "bigger pipe" necessary for the advent of mobile working at the CPS.

"We're getting the networks capable of effectively access from wherever [staff] are without constraint," Jones said.

A more robust network will doubtless prove on the top of many CIOs' shopping lists as the use of cloud computing grows in the enterprise. Is cloud computing on Jones' shopping list too?

"It's not somewhere I think there's a particularly mature view but you can't ignore the advent of the $50 seat. You can't just say sit back and say 'that's not for us', you have to work out what it is behind that - the business model, the drivers, the risks, the complexities, the level of services. Within all of that, I think there's got to be something we've got to embrace. From what I've seen, it isn't going to disappear.

"I'm not saying the government could run with a $50 seat from Amazon or any of the other big providers but there must be some lessons in that business model we can learn from and apply in order to drive down our own cost base," he concluded.