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The UK's “Chief Digital Officer” job has been open for over a year

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Re: The UK's “Chief Digital Officer” job has been open for over a year

#71

Post by ghaff »

ryandrake wrote: post #70
dotBen wrote: post #67

The reality is that at £200k/y a suitably qualified person is taking a massive pay-cut compared to what they could make in the private sector and so would have to want to feel great deal of ideological or public service drive to take this role on. Gov.uk saw a great turnover of talent under the Tories (starting with the Tory/Lib Dem coalition) as many people were simply disenfranchised/unaligned with Tory rule but al…

I don't know--Ignoring the political ideology requirements, I'd guess far more than half of HN have the technical chops to do the job, and far less than half of HN make more than £200k/y.

Very little of a job like this is about technical chops. Oh, they should be able to understand technical issues and tradeoffs and have staff that can dive into technical details, but they're not going to be implementing technical solutions. But something like this is fundamentally a people job.

Re: The UK's “Chief Digital Officer” job has been open for over a year

#72

Post by ghaff »

vkou wrote: post #66
WoefullyInept wrote: post #32

This is the equivalent of accepting minimum wage for being CEO of a S&P 500 company, blindfolded and without a steering wheel.

> minimum wage for being CEO of a S&P 500 company, blindfolded and without a steering wheel I'd personally take that job offer in a heartbeat (And would recommend anyone else to do so as well), because I'd have ~50/50 odds of failing upwards or downwards. Heads, I win, and my next job would be the C-whatever of a S&P 500 company for real wages. Tails, I lose, and my next job would be the C-whatever of a Fortune 5000…

And/or you're on the speaking circuit, field lots of feelers about being on boards, etc. Depending on where you are in your career and your interests (this isn't really a technical job but then neither is the job of CIOs at large companies mostly) the money is almost irrelevant. It's not like you'll be in this position for more than a few years anyway.

Re: The UK's “Chief Digital Officer” job has been open for over a year

#74

Post by pjc50 »

Wohlf wrote: post #30
charlieflowers wrote: post #3

Because it won't have any power. The person will just run around between meetings preaching about the right way to do things, while everyone else in the room rolls their eyes and ignores it. The _main_ problem is not that the govt lacks the _knowledge_ about what to do ... it is that they lack the _will_ to do it.

Also that they often lack the ability to do it, it's the legislative branch that makes the rules and budgets.

Realistically there is almost no separation between executive and legislature; the PM can order both what to do because they're the same party. And these days it's run from the Cabinet office.

The only limitation is the semi-independence of the civil service, which Cummings intends to erase, and the possibility of judicial review of really bad decisions, which may be curtailed soon.

Re: The UK's “Chief Digital Officer” job has been open for over a year

#75

Post by [deleted] »

ryandrake wrote: post #70
dotBen wrote: post #67

The reality is that at £200k/y a suitably qualified person is taking a massive pay-cut compared to what they could make in the private sector and so would have to want to feel great deal of ideological or public service drive to take this role on. Gov.uk saw a great turnover of talent under the Tories (starting with the Tory/Lib Dem coalition) as many people were simply disenfranchised/unaligned with Tory rule but al…

I don't know--Ignoring the political ideology requirements, I'd guess far more than half of HN have the technical chops to do the job, and far less than half of HN make more than £200k/y.

[deleted]

Re: The UK's “Chief Digital Officer” job has been open for over a year

#76

Post by dotBen »

ryandrake wrote: post #70
dotBen wrote: post #67

The reality is that at £200k/y a suitably qualified person is taking a massive pay-cut compared to what they could make in the private sector and so would have to want to feel great deal of ideological or public service drive to take this role on. Gov.uk saw a great turnover of talent under the Tories (starting with the Tory/Lib Dem coalition) as many people were simply disenfranchised/unaligned with Tory rule but al…

I don't know--Ignoring the political ideology requirements, I'd guess far more than half of HN have the technical chops to do the job, and far less than half of HN make more than £200k/y.

I've been in tech for 20 years from a software engineer through to founder, an executive and now a VC... I know the type of people who do this job and I don't think I'm suitably qualified.

My time at the BBC showed that public-service/civil-service tech leadership is part people management, part political maneuvering, part vision and a small dose of any actually tech experience. It's certainly more CIO not CTO.

Re: The UK's “Chief Digital Officer” job has been open for over a year

#77

Post by [deleted] »

jamestimmins wrote: post #5
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #2

>the UK is recruiting a Government Chief Digital Officer (GCDO), who will be working at the highest levels of the Cabinet Office to lead the digital transformation of public services in the country. All of this and more, for £200,000 a year. Maybe the reason they can't find anyone to do this is that they are underpaying for the position. The responsibilities described sound at least at the level of a Senior VP, if no…

There's an unhelpful idea that government employees shouldn't make a lot of money. But if that person is the difference between a billion dollar project succeeding or failing, a $1-2 million salary is a worthwhile price for top talent.

[deleted]

Re: The UK's “Chief Digital Officer” job has been open for over a year

#78

Post by rdiddly »

I remember seeing it advertised, being interested, following the link, reading it, and eventually wandering off suddenly having no interest whatsoever. Don't remember what it was about it exactly, but obviously they should take pains to fix or at least conceal whatever it is in their recruitment materials that is making the job seem like hell on earth.

Re: The UK's “Chief Digital Officer” job has been open for over a year

#79

Post by motohagiography »

g_p wrote: post #47
motohagiography wrote: post #24

Having been through a few of these public sector transformations as a consultant, there is no "there," from "here." Strategically, the play for a few successive governments has been to stand up new arms length agencies outside the public service proper that have missions to develop new platforms, with the intent to migrate the public service to them when they arrive. The successes have been where the stand-alone agen…

> If I were running this, I would take a radical approach, where the strategy would be a venture model that micro-funded projects to create useful products that solved for providing future services and applications, and not legacy ones. The above is more similar to some ideas being floated about in various halls of government than you might think. That of course doesn't mean it will happen, given the quirks of govern…

Indeed, and thank you. The reason I have taken the startup and consulting route is the intuition that these are upstream of the institutions, and this is where I suspect a technically inclined individual can effect the most change.

In the ~20y I've been around govt, arguably Linux, GitHub, Docker, Jira/Atlassian, PowerBI, VMWare, LinkedIn, SalesForce, and even Twitter have done more to transform government than any endogenous solution could. EVen in the last 5 years, AirBNB and Uber have altered the economics of municipalities faster than anything planned might have. These techs are all still in early stages there, (and the economics of devops break public service finance, but that's another story) but you can see the downstream effects they have.

So far regarding public services, my two favourite models have been In-Q-Tel and 18f.gov. The first is far upstream, and the second has been a way to navigate it. It's worth considering that a public sector CTO role is really a "steady hand on the tiller" role to navigate the things we're all building upstream. The CTO is a necessary role, but my experience is that heroes and visionaries will likely select out fast, and framing it as a navigator role might yield different results.

Re: The UK's “Chief Digital Officer” job has been open for over a year

#80

Post by unfocused »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #2

>the UK is recruiting a Government Chief Digital Officer (GCDO), who will be working at the highest levels of the Cabinet Office to lead the digital transformation of public services in the country. All of this and more, for £200,000 a year. Maybe the reason they can't find anyone to do this is that they are underpaying for the position. The responsibilities described sound at least at the level of a Senior VP, if no…

I'm not saying I don't agree with paying more, I'm just noting that it's not likely to happen.

For the same reason that someone who is a lawyer can be Prime Minister, and only make ~$250K running an entire country, or go private and make millions as a top lawyer. Same deal here in Canada. The best that recent CIO of Canada did was bump his pay to a Deputy Minister level, still around the $200K CDN mark.

He (Alex Benay) left after 2 years on the job.

Also, this job's true description, is convincing people entrenched in the old ways, to convert. That's it. Forget about everything else. At this level, you are not technical, you are trying to sell value to higher ups. Some of these folks are not technical at all, and you will hit roadblocks.

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