CIO 100 COMPANIES IN Public Sector

1. Ministry of Defence

The Ministry of Defence continues to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq. Technology is charged with giving troops a competitive edge and also saving time, money and lives.

2. Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs

The breakdown in HMRC management control and information security policy led to the biggest data loss in recent history last year, rocking faith in government IT.

5. Department for Work & Pensions

The Department of Work and Pensions manages the £155 billion paid out each year to 26 million UK citizens. This year it had met ambitious efficiency targets.

23. The Metropolitan Police

The Met's annual report said it spends around £300 million on IT and supports some 30,000 desktops that are being upgraded to Windows XP.

27. Home Office

The Home Office has undergone a tremendous organisational shake-up as the next stage of development in the government’s shared services vision to increase accuracy, delivery levels and management capabilities across public functions.

36. Department of Constitutional Affairs

As the government department traditionally responsible for the English and Welsh courts, legal aid and justice system, the Department Constitutional Affairs (DCA) had its remit extended last year to also include probation, prisons and prevention of re-offending that was previously the responsibility of the Home Office.

39. Birmingham City Council

In screen terms Birmngham runs 18,000 desktops, just over 3,000 laptops and 200 Citrix terminals. Recently Service Birmingham received a £52 million contract extension to take over the council’s contact centre operations.

51. Fife Council

New CIO Terry Trundley was initially appointed as interim Head of IT by Chief Executive Ronnie Hinds to report back on how the IT Service could be transformed to meet the new challenges facing local government.

56. Kent County Council

Kent County Council ICT group delivers support across 360 locations. The council has plans for 10 walk in “Gateway” contact centres, two are operational already, which will deliver council services on a “retail basis”. In the last year the council also introduced its Kent Card, an electronic payment card through which citizens pay for social services. Kent set up the payment card system through a deal with the Royal Bank of Scotland.

57. Hampshire County Council

Hampshire continues to use IT as the basis for ambitious business transformation and improved service delivery. The Council was one of the first UK organisations to seriously commit to a thin client architecture some ten years ago.

65. Leeds City Council

Leeds City Council is proud of its ongoing programme to exploit technology to raise the levels and channels of service it is tasked with providing to its 715,000 citizens.

66. Manchester City Council

According to the Manchester Evening News “The computer age dawned on June 21 1948 in a house in Bridgeford Street, opposite Manchester University, when the display tube of the Small Scale Experiment Machine, nicknamed Baby, lit up with the correct answer to the mathematical problem set it 52 minutes earlier.” This, it is said, was the first ever programmable computer at work.

74. Glasgow City Council

Glasgow City Council has a joint venture with supplier Serco in the form of a Limited Liability Partnership. This 10 year contract is a £265 million deal which aims to save £70 million while improving services to citizens.

77. DEFRA

It has been an up and down year at the department of environment, farms and rural affairs. Distribution of farming subsidies to UK farmers was still overpaying some farmers and underpaying others, and the blame was laid at the door the IT systems.

82. Foreign & Commonwealth Office

The Foreign & Commonwealth Office has had a new IT leader since May 2007 - Tony Mather, who joined from BOC, where he was IM services director for four years.

84. Surrey County Council

Surrey is now two years into its plan to use IT to save a total of £34m over the next ten years. The County Council has invested in SAP, CRM, call centre and IBM hosted services.

86. West Sussex County Council

Paul Brocklehurst told CIO that the £14 million it spends annually on IT has been split between a desktop service provision deal which has seen it outsourced to Serco in a five year £12m deal.

87. Liverpool City Council

Liverpool is the UK's sixth largest city with a population of nearly half a million. It is the European Capital of Culture 2008. Liverpool City Council was one of Britain's worst performing local authorities in terms of service quality, yet charged the highest council tax in the country.

89. Lancashire County Council

Lancashire County Council serves a population of 1.1 million people. The council prides itself on retaining most of its services in-house and benchmarking is part of its long term performance management.

90. Essex County Council

Like all public sector bodies, post the Gershon agenda, ways to find greater efficiencies and cost savings are always a priority. Essex is very much not an exception to this rule, judging from a number of initiatives this year the Council has taken to try and improve services.

97. Department for Transport

The Department for Transport's objective is to deliver reliable and efficient transport networks that support economic growth and improved productivity.

99. Sunderland City Council

Sunderland has been restyling itself away from its post-industrial heritage since in the 1990s with a special telematics strategy, which set the foundations for attracting more high-tech employers.

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