Five months later, Defence seeks new CTO

1

Slow connection as a snail

blog It’s clear that things move very slowly within the Federal Government. But taking five months to post an advertisement seeking a replacement for an executive who has publicly announced their departure seems like a little long. As first reported by iTNews, the Department of Defence has finally advertised the position of chief technology officer. You can find the advertisement online here. It states:

“The Chief Information Officer Group is seeking an outstanding senior executive to lead its Technology Division. The Chief Information Officer Group (CIOG), within the Department of Defence, is responsible for ensuring that Defence has a dependable, secure and integrated Defence Single Information Environment (SIE) to support Defence business and military operations.

As the head of the Technology Division, you will be responsible for strategic guidance and technical direction for Defence ICT and ensuring appropriate commercial arrangements are in place. Specifically you will also have responsibility for: Defence ICT Strategy; Defence Enterprise Architecture; Defence ICT Security, and; Group Commercial functions within CIOG.

To be a strong contender for this role, you will need to have extensive experience in the ICT industry, especially managing and delivering ICT strategy, architecture and direction in a large, complex and diverse organisation. You will have strong awareness and understanding of information security and ideally been directly involved in, or lead an information security function during your career. In addition, an awareness of new and emerging technologies and their applicability to Defence will be critical to be successful in the role. You will also have strong verbal communication skills and demonstrated ability as a persuasive leader to communicate highly technical information to non-technical senior Defence executives.”

The position of Defence CTO was vacated by incumbent Matt Yannopoulous in October last year. The executive had announced his departure to lead the IT operations of the Department of Immigration and Citizenship several months earlier at the end of August. His resignation would appear to leave Defence a little short-handed in terms of its senior IT executives, with another of its senior IT executives, Major General Michael Milford, having to fill the position on an acting basis.

The news comes as reports over the past several years have made it clear that Defence is currently engaged in a number of major ICT projects that contain a high degree of risk. For example, in December 2011 the Federal Government’s chief auditor warned that the Department of Defence’s ICT operation was teetering on the brink of a dangerous precipice, in a landmark report published at that stage into its current ICT governance structures and projects.

1 COMMENT

Comments are closed.