The McCue Interview: UK Government CIO Ian Watmore

New government CIO Ian Watmore is trying to convince me the media should be writing more about planes landing safely. No it's not some strange Dustin-Hoffman-in-Rain-Man-style rant about airline crash statistics but one of his many analogies about IT.

Watmore makes the point that while the big IT project failures hit the headlines and public perception of government IT is "at an all-time low", most public sector IT projects are in fact successful.

"I recognise that in journalistic speak that stories of planes landing safely are duller but nevertheless the reality is that an awful lot of our IT equivalents to planes do land very safely," he says.

Of course Watmore's not blind to the fact that significant sums of taxpayers' money are still wasted each year on IT projects that go wrong - but more on that later.

It's nine months now since Watmore left his high-flying - and no doubt high-paying - job as UK MD of Accenture to take on the challenge of a role analogous to that of the CIO of a large private sector multinational company. He's spent the time meeting everyone and getting his team together.

Watmore has moved into the space vacated by the outgoing e-Envoy, Andrew Pinder, at the Cabinet Office's e-Government unit in London. Watmore still commutes from his Cheshire home, staying in his London flat during the week - which no doubt gives him time to follow both his beloved Arsenal football team and check on the progress of his son, who is at the Manchester United academy

Many people might question his sanity in moving from the relative comfort of his private sector role to one that will be subject to immense media and political scrutiny but Watmore cites exciting challenges posed by the likes of the ID card project and the NHS IT modernisation programme - and the chance to genuinely have an impact on society.

"I didn't exactly take this job for the pay. I did it because I thought it was the best job in my industry that was going and that's the point about working on the government side. You've got that brilliant mixture of challenge between being in difficult projects and programmes which, if you have a masochistic streak like me, you like doing. But equally at the end of it if you do actually make it work it really is impactful," he says.

It's this mixture of public service duty and challenge he says will also be key in attracting skilled IT professionals back into the government sector and convincing them it is a "proper" career.

"There was a recognised career path with training and promotion and community in the 1980s. We lost that in the 1990s with the outsourcing agenda," he says. "But if you can really help to transform a frontline public service then that is very appealing to people. I think we need to appeal on that level and pay enough to get them across but we are not going to compete on pay grounds ever and I'm not even going to try and make that appeal."

Watmore plans to start with what he calls a team of five to 10 "heavy hitters" who will be given an almost roving portfolio across central and local government IT.

"We are going to be going after the people with the very best experience out there. There's no point me doing this with people who have medium level of experience on this. This has got to be really heavy-hitting type experience," he says. "In particular what I want to do at the centre is to get a small team of heavy hitters in to join the Cabinet Office team but whose primary role is to go out there and work for whoever has the biggest project of the day and therefore they'd go and work for the NHS and then maybe do a year there and when they've finished that stint go and do a year on the ID card project or whatever it is that is next in the frame."

Another key plank of Watmore's plans is the creation of a government "CIO council" to help formulate a cohesive IT strategy for the public sector. The first meeting was held last month with 21 heads of IT from central and local government and key public sector agencies such as the NHS and Criminal Justice.

The team will meet three times a year and Watmore is insistent it will not just become another government talking shop, with an IT strategy document due to be published later this year.

Watmore has also outlined several "critical" areas for action, one of which is getting away from the idea that IT projects have to go live on a set date regardless of whether it's really ready just because of a government policy commitment.

"A critical message is that we don't implement things just because a date has come around. We implement them when they are ready. It is better to spend that extra period of time testing, proving and trialling things until they are ready and accept that on occasion that may mean it is later than original dates. That is far better practice than hitting a date, putting it out there and then watching problems happen," he says.

Watmore admits there are "tensions" about the implementation of schemes driven by political policy considerations but he said politicians are now more realistic because their awareness of the difficulties involved in these big IT projects has increased over the last decade.

Another area Watmore has identified as being problematic for government IT is the period immediately after procurement, which he describes as "pivotal" to the success or failure of contracts.

"My experience from the private sector is that a lot of projects go wrong in that critical period. They are well-procured but they don't change pace or gear swiftly enough for whatever reason. Often you get a procurement team and a sales team and then you get a delivery team on both sides and it's in those first few weeks and months that the change of pace or gear from procurement to delivery is a pivotal period," he says.

The private sector experience he talks about comes from an entire career spent to date at Accenture. Watmore joined that company straight from Cambridge University where he read maths and management studies. He jokes that this is therefore only his second job.

Watmore is as far from the image of a stuffy public sector civil servant as you could imagine and is more up-to-date with pop culture than his "seventies punk phase" and Pink Floyd obsession would suggest.

He has the obligatory iPod and an Apple desktop machine at home and is proud of the fact he discovered recent Brit Awards-winning band the Scissor Sisters before his kids did. His love of music also leads to another one of his unusual IT analogies, which relates to his college years as a budding disco DJ.

"I use that as an illustration of how IT works. A good disco doesn't make a good party but a bad party can be created by a bad disco," he jokes.

You certainly wouldn't bet against Watmore running a successful government IT "disco" if he is given the political backing, time and resources to carry out his vision. And - who knows - there might just be a few more stories in the years to come about planes landing safely.