Scottish local government chief digital officer and University of West of Scotland CIO named among top 100 UK CIOs

Claudette Jones - Image credit: City of Edinburgh Council

Two Scottish public sector chief information officers (CIOs) have been listed among the top 100 digital leaders in the UK.

Scottish local government chief digital officer Martyn Wallace and University of the West of Scotland CIO Claudette Jones have been ranked 62  and 71 respectively in the 2018 CIO 100.

The list is a celebration of the top technology leads in the public, private and third sectors in the UK, with top named CIOs coming from bodies including Global Radio, Trainline, Arsenal FC, Department for Work and Pensions and HMRC.

Wallace has led the Digital Office for Scottish Local Government since it was formed in October 2016.

One of the key projects overseen by Wallace this year has been the production of a shared toolkit for councils on the EU’s General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR), resulting in savings of over £1m.

He has also conducted a series of digital maturity assessments with Scotland’s local authorities to help identify gaps in their own programmes and identify new challenges to collaborate on and encouraged a culture of innovation and being willing to fail.

Jones – who was previously CIO at City of Edinburgh Council – has been recognised for her work to increase student satisfaction, which has included a major infrastructure upgrade to increase availability of wifi across the university’s campuses and halving staff travel time by introducing videoconferencing on all devices.

She also oversaw the creation of a single student portal and a student engagement tracker that helps identify if a student may be struggling.

Wallace said: “It’s great to be recognised amongst some great CIO’s from very large well known and in some cases global businesses.

“However, I can’t take all the credit as I couldn’t do the role without my dedicated team and the cohorts working on the programme in the Digital Partnership.”