Govt asked to speed up appointment of a State CIO

23 Mar 2011

There have been fresh calls at the Ireland e-Government Awards for the appointment of a Government CIO to better co-ordinate internet and technology innovation and projects among Government departments and avoid ‘silo mentality.’

This year’s overall winner of the Ireland e-Government Award were the Courts Service and An Garda Síochána for their creation of the Criminal Justice Interoperability Programme.

This service co-ordinates court and prisoner information and was cited by the judges as a clear example of two divisions working together to deliver major productivity gains and achieve better results in the area of justice for the public.

Awards organiser Maeve Kneafsey of Elucidate said the appointment of a State CIO will drive similar examples of State bodies working together to drive better digital services for citizens and eradicate ‘silo mentality’ within various departments.

“All of us who work in the digital economy are looking forward to the long-awaited appointed of the Government internet CIO, one of whose tasks will be to eradicate any ‘silo mentality’ within various departments and deliver much more cross-department e-Government,” Kneafsey said.

“The aim being to make sure that, digitally speaking, for example, the Department of Enterprise and Innovation is in direct, online, contact with the Department of Finance. This could mean, for the first time, that the right hand of Government will know what the left hand is doing.

“The implications for cost savings are huge if this can tackle a whole series of co-ordinated tasks, such as the granting of a planning permission and the payment of insulation grants, or cracking down on the issuance of various types of licences to people who may also owe the State taxes,” Kneafsey added.