Registers of Scotland’s Tom Meade named digital leader of the year at Connect ICT Awards

Tom Meade - Image credit: Registers of Scotland

Registers of Scotland digital director Tom Meade has been named digital leader of the year at this year’s Holyrood Connect ICT Awards.

The Connect Digital Leader Award is given to an individual who has demonstrated excellence in leadership, innovation and quality in the use and promotion of IT in their organisation to improve delivery of public services.

Since joining Registers of Scotland as head of digital in 2014, Meade has delivered a digital transformation throughout the organisation.

The transformation has brought financial and operational benefits, including savings of £750,000 in licensing fees and £1.5m on outsourced support through a move to open source systems as well as an additional £1.5m saving in lost operation time.

Within a year Records of Scotland had gone from three releases a year to 52, from an average of three days downtime per release to zero days’ downtime and from £25,000 per release to £500 per release.

The Digital Leader Award was one of nine awards presented at the annual Holyrood event to recognise excellence in public sector digital technology.

CalMac Ferries and the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service scooped two awards each.

CalMac took the ICT Team Award and Project Delivery Award for its digital transformation programme moving from an obsolete IT system to a cloud platform.

The Scottish Fire and Rescue Service was awarded the Mobile Award and the Cloud Adoption Award for its delivery of a single operational intelligence system across Scotland along with a suite of mobile applications that give firefighters access to safety-critical information wherever and whenever they need it.

Strathclyde Partnership for Transport (SPT) won the Innovate Award for its move to a paperlite operation, while the local government Improvement Service was presented with the Citizen Award for replacing around a million concessionary travelcards using data matching with no disruption to service for customers or transport operators.

Meanwhile, the Scottish Government, NHS National Services Scotland (NSS) and The Data Lab were jointly awarded the Connect Data Insight Award for using data analysis to identify hospital patients at risk of delayed discharge.

The Connect Digital Health and Care Award went to the Scottish Centre for Telehealth and Telecare for expanding the Home & Mobile Health Monitoring programme across 12 different health boards.

The full list of winners and all the shortlisted entries can be found on the Holyrood Connect ICT Awards website.