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Leading a horse to water
Profile: Government CIO John Suffolk

By Julian Goldsmith

Published: Monday 23 June 2008

Government CIO John Suffolk is number five in this year's silicon.com CIO50 list. It's a testament to his standing in the CIO community and an acknowledgement of just how critical his role is.

CIO50 2008: Top 10

The UK's leading CIOs revealed…

1.Robin Dargue Royal Mail

2.David Lister Royal Bank of Scotland

3.Neil Cameron Unilever

4.Catherine Doran Network Rail

5.John Suffolk UK government

6.Gordon Lovell-Read Siemens UK

7.Paul Coby British Airways

8.Tania Howarth Birds Eye Iglo Group

9.Simon Post Carphone Warehouse

10.Ben Wishart Whitbread

Suffolk has an easy manner and usually wears a smile that verges on the cheeky. It's difficult not to warm to him, which is a characteristic he is bound to find useful in his role as an architect for public sector transformation.

Oddly, he doesn't have his own IT department. Instead he relies on the CIOs of each government organisation to fulfil the strategies he lays down. Not all of them are fans, so he is going to need all his charm to push through the initiatives conceived in the Gershon and Varney reports.

Suffolk has a great deal of public sector experience but his roots are in the commercial world of financial services. This means even though he is a technologist and a public servant, he sees his task in terms of business need.

Much of what he is involved in is high level and he couches the issues in terms a business leader, rather than an IT employee, would be comfortable with.

The issues that most concern Suffolk are maintaining the quality of the IT professionals employed by the public sector, encouraging shared services and overseeing big-ticket IT projects that are designed to accomplish sweeping efficiencies but which sometimes end up creating more problems.

All these tasks ultimately mean one thing to Suffolk - better public services. "The whole value proposition focus is on citizens. Putting citizens at the heart of what we do is never going to go away. Cut us in half and you should see citizens at the core in terms of focus - why we exist," he says.

"Driving through things like the tell-us-once programmes or the work we are doing on contact centres are all critically important and if you asked me what my priority is in 12 months' time, I would give you the same answer," adds Suffolk.

Much of what he is focused on he considers mundane yet capable of affecting spending on a huge scale. One of the projects on the go is benchmarking the adequate PC.

"My 25 years in financial services made me understand and appreciate the value of numbers. We have over five million public servants - say you had about four million PCs. Let's be generous and say a million of them are the bee's knees and three million aren't. If you can save £100 of the total cost of ownership each year, that's £300m you're saving each year," he says.

One of the more sophisticated ways in which the government is trying to save money is through departments and local authorities sharing back-end processes.

Notable trailblazers in this are the Cabinet Office sharing services with other, smaller departments such as the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills, the Office of National Statistics and The Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service through a framework called Flex.

But not every IT leader in the public sector is enthusiastic about the initiative. Shared services have been criticised by one public sector CIO for not being able to show a unit cost.

Suffolk was dismissive of the gripe, saying that it is not for a head of IT to make decisions on something that is a business issue.

He says: "Any organisation where the IT man is making the decisions has got their business design wrong… I don't want anyone to do shared services that aren't going to create value.

"If you look at the examples, we have done exactly that from a unit-costing perspective because we are unit-costing in our NAO reporting. Price has its place but you have to think about the complete value proposition. Sometimes it's a cost-neutral issue."

In the end though, Suffolk accepts that it would be madness to make the whole UK public sector adopt a single IT framework, such as Flex.

He acknowledges that many of the hundreds of organisations in the public sector will have existing IT partners that they have contracts with for years to come. He is pragmatic in his approach to sceptics.

"What we do say on things like Flex with a huge investment model is begin to travel towards it. When you come into a replacement cycle, adopt Flex. If you can't beat it, you should join it. If you can beat it, tell us how and we'll copy it," he says.

Suffolk has about another year to his tenure as government CIO and it would be impossible to bring the whole of the public sector to the state envisioned by Messrs Gershon and Varney. The best he can do is keep the sector moving towards that goal.