Tory questions identify government's best paid CIOs

Age?

How old are they?

There may be a trend of bumping up salaries in final year in order to maximise one's pension (if you know what I mean - final year salary and all that).

Just to pee people off....

...looking after the NHS, 100K doesn't seem that much.

Bet there are many web designers, programmers and consultants on more than that per year...

as for

A/C "Government bloody workers"

Fine, enjoy emptying your bins, treating your own wounds, building your own roads, putting out your own fires, policing your own neighbourhood, running your own school..

Muppet....

And the problem is...

Ok, I'm going to put the cat amongst the pigeons here, but what the heck is the problem?

Assuming they are performing, you'd expect to have someone fairly kickass at the head of department that spends in excess of a billion pounds. In fact you would expect to get the someone who is incredibly good. In those situations you will be competing with the top CIO of financial institutions.

You need that kind of salary to attract the best. There will be few people in the country with the required experience to manage that size department.

Sure I'm opening myself to a whole bunch of cynical comments on how these departments are all rubbish and therefor the head must be rubbish as well. I really don't know whether the departments are any good , or whether under that leadership we've seen improvement. My point is if you want someone that is good in that role expect to pay some serious money. If they are good their pay will be justified 1000x.

Of course, we could put an IT support pleb in charge instead, whack his wage up £21k which will make him happy and see what happens with the 1.5Bn budget..... yeah...right

Within the Range of Private Sector CIO's

Seems reasonable to me. I doubt there are many Private sector CIO's paid under the 100k mark, as others noted, its possible for ordinary developer types to hit the wrong side of 50k.

The NHS IT initiative comment is pertinent to though - however one suspects its due to kack requirements - this is where most IT projects fall down.

By the numbers

Sad though it may be, I looked up the sizes of those departments in their Departmental Annual Reports, and compared CIO Budget against headcount.

Department | Employees (FTE 2008/9) | CIO £ per capita

Home Office | 26,016 | £196

Defence | 270,820 | £319

Justice | 76,343 |£3,170

Comm & LG | 5,376 | £5,655

Int'l Dev | 2,400 | £10,417

Work& Pensions | 102,374 | £11,624

CS&F | 2,811.5 | £15,650

FCO | 4,521 | £35,390

Health | 3,468 | £432,526

There's no good way to post a table here, but the bottom line is that Health spends *over two THOUSAND TIMES* as much on CIO function per person than the Home Office does. What am I missing?!!1!

Treasury

"HM Treasury was the only department to report that its CIO, Karen Delafield, is on pay band one"

Funny how the beancounters' office is the only place where it's actually quite difficult to screw a ricockulously obscene salary out of your own budget.

@ AC 17:01 GMT

"You need that kind of salary to attract the best."

I call bullshit. What's needed is more of a K-Mart blue light special attitude toward hiring executives: maybe not quite as good, but a whole lot cheaper. Considering that Britain is essentially bankrupt, even if the IMF hasn't yet come knocking on the door to haul the chancellor away, where does the idea come from that the UK can even afford the best? Can't afford it, seems to me.

Frankly, most management positions could be filled quite well by wandering out to the nearest bus stop and tapping some random person on the shoulder. The management caste has managed (excuse the pun!) to put forth the meme that they're special. They're not; at best they act like a bunch of Dilbertesque pointy-haired bosses, at worst they actively terrorize their underlings, the people who actually do useful work.

When I was still working, I was moaning to my immediate supervisor about the CEO's penchant for fucking the dog and other assorted wasteful sillinesses. Reply? "Oh, but he's the CEO, he can do anything he wants!" My response? "He's paid a great deal of money and should therefore be held to a much higher standard of behavior."

I wish I had a photograph of the puzzled non-comprende look on the supervisor's face.

In moments when my imagination runs wild, I dream of a society in which there are two rules of management compensation. One, that no one in an organization can make than a fixed-by-law multiple of what the most poorly paid minion makes. A factor of 4.0 or maybe 5.0 would be about right. Two, that all managers must have at least 10% of the drones under them making more, on the grounds that anybody can "manage", but only a few can do truly specialized work demanding real talent, experience, and education.

Apologies to our Divine Moderatrix for going off on a rant, but over compensated, under worked, utterly unqualified managers are a particular peeve of mine.

@Jonathan Richards 1

Very intersting numbers.

My guess was salary proportional to IT budget (roughly).