The UK government has announced that Liam Maxwell, currently director of ICT futures at the Cabinet Office, is to become its new deputy CIO.
The job became available when former deputy CIO Bill McCluggage left the post in November 2011 to join storage and information management vendor EMC.
Maxwell was previously head of ICT at Eton College, a Conservative councillor for Windsor & Maidenhead, and an advisor to the Conservative party on IT related issues. Windor & Maidenhead was the first council to publish its spending online.
As director of ICT futures, Maxwell was responsible for "improving the government’s capability to meet this challenge of fast-moving technology in order to drive change in the way in which the Government adopts a more rapid and open ICT development approach".
He has been a proponent of open source software, open standards and increased procurement from SMEs during his time in the role. In 2008, he wrote a report on government use of open source software, entitled ‘Better for Less’.
"Government must stop believing it is special and use commodity IT services much more widely," he wrote in the report.
Interesting Links
Ministry of Justice’s Andy Nelson announced as new government CIO
He was most recently seen announcing a new, "single customer" procurement agreement with software and systems giant Oracle. The deal, which means the government will now buy directly from Oracle rather than through systems integrators, will mean that government will have to use less customised systems, Maxwell said.
When asked how the Oracle deal fit with the strategy to use more open source software in government, Maxwell replied: "We are committed to a level playing field on open source, and this makes that playing field more competitive."
