The UK government’s CIO will retire in March 2012, it was revealed yesterday.
The news of Joe Harley’s departure from the top public sector IT job comes two weeks after it emerged that his deputy, Bill McCluggage, is leaving to join IT supplier EMC later this year.
Harley, who is also CIO of the Department of Work and Pensions, was formerly IT chief at ICI Paints and IT vice president of applications, hosting and consultant at oil giant BP.
Both Harley and McCluggage were instrumental in developing the action plan for the government’s IT strategy, but neither will be in place to implement it.
This morning, Gartner’s public sector IT analyst Andrea DiMaio noted a possible trend of government CIOs leaving their posts before implementing their strategies. He pointed to former US government CIO Vivek Kundra and McCluggage as examples.
"There seems to be a trend with government IT executives who spend a fair amount of their time pushing for change, and then leave somebody else in charge of that change," DiMaio wrote on his blog.
"Most likely, these are personal decisions motivated by the desire to leverage early accomplishments," he added. "But they can also be read as a lack of confidence in the achievability of what they have planned."
