I’d forgotten about Andrew Pinder’s Franchise Directors. Where did they end up?

My nominations for CIO are:

Tim Jones (ex NatWest, Mondex etc)
Ross Anderson (shd liven things up)
Owen Barder (ex DfID, now in US)
James Cronin
and now my mind has strayed to Kermit and Miss Piggy, so time to break for a cup of tea. Any more ideas?

It took 18 months to produce a document (Transformational Government) that contained nothing new. Ian Watmore should have got this out, Kennedy fashion (JFK that is, not Charles), in 30 days. It would have been easy to do – it’s a snapshot of what he inherited, not new ground.

So-called new ideas (segment/audience Directors) are a re-tread of the Franchise Directors Andrew Pinder already introduced.

The “big idea” of shared services is one industry did back in the 1990s.

What took 18 months to produce this? It either indicates a complete lack of knowledge of what went before (worrying), or is deliberately disingenuous in dressing old mutton up as lamb

Watmore himself is clearly sincere. But as MD at Accenture when I knew him he did not drive strategy and policy, his focus was internal admin and running the business, taking partners for lunch and so on. The team he has around him now have poor track records in government and are little respected (it would be good if they would focus on the big issues and stop looking at their watch and tut-tutting red-faced when someone arrives 5 mins late for a meeting). One wonders whether they are really Tories set on completely undermining the Labour party’s agenda, so perverse is their behaviour.

Several years from now we will see yet another report that again says the same things. The guilty will be promoted (again), the innocent punished. Let’s get a real CIO into the new vacancy who can clear out this reactionary bunch, inspire confidence inside and outside of govt – and really make things happen.

Who wants to start the nominations …?

Have the failures of past IT projects been adequately addressed ? The coverage in the strategy document is superficial and complacent. The success of any developmemnt programme will be as much about process as about objectives and the process being applied is fundamentally broken.