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16 March 2016

Lowry is due to take up his position mid-April, by which time we would hope to have the grand coalition, or whatever emerges, in place.

Highly qualified
Lowry is a highly qualified, hugely experienced and deeply respected professional who would be perceived as having deep people skills, professional development having been a key part of his role most recently in the NI civil service.

With such a capable individual at the helm to implement what was already a fine and detailed strategy document, the outlook for public sector IT, and the tech sector as whole, is good — if, and you could hear that on coming, Lowry gets the political support he needs to do what is necessary.

It has long been rumoured that one of the reasons we are now on our third high profile holder of this role is that previous holders did not have the political support necessary to do what was right in implementing sensible policies to re-organise services and responsibilities to take advantage of all that recent technological developments, from cloud and mobility to analytics and automation, have to offer.

Now I can’t comment on the truth of these rumours, but they are widespread, persistent and consistent. Regardless of their veracity, in this instance, their influence is impact enough.

And this is where things get less encouraging. Both major parties have an appalling record of handling public service reform. This would be the kind of reform necessary to have a proper re-organisation of responsibilities and control necessary to have the Office of the Government CIO (OGCIO) be effective in implementing the ICT strategy developed by Michael McGrath.

Grand coalition
The potential is there for the grand coalition. With such a strong position, a single champion, say whoever gets the ministry of Public Expenditure and Reform (PER), to put the political clout behind the moving and shaking of the GCIO would be all that is necessary to put in place the foundation for a truly connected, data-driven set of modern public services that meet the needs of Irish people today.

But again, neither party has a good record of taking responsibility for making, or supporting, decisions for deep reform of public services.

In summary then, the so called political revolution that has been seen in the general election is in reality nothing of the sort and actually is more of a return to business as usual. The markets and business community certainly seem to be seeing it that way. In this context, the new government, with the appointment of the new GCIO, has the opportunity to do something positive to promote the tech sector and move public services on — if it has the courage to back it.

We’ll see.

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