How to modernise Whitehall
Foreign and Commonwealth Office CIO Tony Mather on government IT
By Martin Veitch | CIO UK | Published 12:55, 20 January 10
Tony Mather is sitting in his large office near Horse Guards Parade amid the sorts of trappings you might expect for the CIO of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. There are pictures, including one of the Queen; there are green-shaded desk lamps that look like they might have come from a film set; there is a leather sofa; and there is a gilt-framed mirror that must be seven feet high. All present and correct. So it comes as something of a surprise when he says that he'd rather be in a serviced office or even in Milton Keynes.
The FCO has offices in the famously unlovely Buckinghamshire new town and Mather says he would gladly "move to a Regus tomorrow".
"It's the team dynamic," he explains. "Heritage equals legacy and I want somewhere that locally engaged UK staff can sit together. We're trying to build the ‘one-team' approach."
And no matter how attractive and evocative of the British Empire's one-time pink-hued re-painting of the atlas, the warren of offices and corridors of power doesn't help build that dynamic.
"The day I joined the FCO my productivity halved," says Mather, who took on the role at the FCO from gases group BOC to make his bow in the public sector two years ago. "Here, if you were not at your desk, you weren't working."
