The Great Debate UK

Dear Prime Minister – leave tech spending alone

-Steve Ranger is the editor of silicon.com. The opinions expressed are his own. Join Reuters for a live discussion with guests as Chancellor George Osborne makes  an emergency budget statement at 12:30 p.m. British time on Tuesday, June 22, 2010. -

There has never been a more important time for chief information officers to raise their profiles and make their worth clear – especially in the public sector, where over the next few years budgets will be under attack like never before.

We were particularly pleased that in this year’s silicon.com CIO50, an annual programme which celebrates the best technology chiefs in the UK, we saw more CIOs voting, and more CIOs being nominated to date.

This year’s winner was John Suffolk, the UK government CIO, who is in charge of setting the technology strategy for the entire public sector.

IT spending has been one of the first victims of the new government’s belt-tightening, with the coalition already having identified hundreds of millions in potential cuts from IT budgets across Whitehall, and put in place an immediate freeze on any new IT projects worth more than 1 million pounds.

The thinking probably runs something like this: government IT projects have had a tremendous track record of running late and over budget, and the last thing the UK needs now is more extremely expensive digital white elephants.