Long-standing NSW Department of Education and Training chief information officer Stephen Wilson will leave the role this week, the department confirmed this afternoon.

A spokesperson for the department said Wilson had decided not to renew his contract with DET after a five-year stint. This story was first broken by the AustralianIT.

This week will be Wilson’s last week. The department is planning to appoint a replacement for Wilson, but has not yet confirmed how that process will take place.

The NSW Department of Education runs one of the Australia’s largest technology support departments, and Wilson has overseen some dramatic changes during his time at the wheel.

For starters, in 2008 DET migrated its 1.5 million school students off its Microsoft Exchange email platform and onto Gmail, in one of the largest Gmail migrations globally so far. Wilson has also been involved in the rollout of the Federal Government’s Digital Education Revolution program in the state — in March he said the department was rolling out 10,000 laptops to students per week.

A lower profile rollout recently saw a massive deployment of Microsoft’s Hyper-V software to some 437 schools across NSW, in what again constituted one of the largest deployments known in Australia of the software — a rival technology to virtualisation leader VMWare.

According to a biography on Adobe’s website, Wilson had a long-term career with Johnson & Johnson — including in sales, but ending in IT — before joining DET in August 2005 as CIO. The AustralianIT has reported that he has picked up a role in the private sector.

Image credit: Guillermo Ossa, royalty free

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