MI5 recruiters enter the Strategy Boutique in CIO search
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MI5 aims to recruit a senior business executive to head up big changes to its IT operation, ahead of an anticipated squeeze on the intelligence budget.
A six-figure salary is on offer for the Security Service's "head of transformation and office of CIO".
All the intelligence agencies are making huge technological investments and structural changes costing hundreds of millions of pounds as they adapt to the online world. In March it was revealed that older MI5 officers with poor IT skills face redundancy.
At the same time it is scheduled to open four new halls at its data centre in 2011. The same year it plans to complete a brand new backup data centre, which it will share with MI6. The "head of transformation" at the Security Service will play a central role in the programme.
Not that the recruitment advert gives that much away. Apart from experience in blue-chip organisations, the main requirement seems to be fluency in managementese.
The successful candidate will be responsible for "shaping the transformation and leading it through implementation, capturing the hearts and minds of the CIO organisation and the wider group of MI5 stakeholders", it explains.
Applications close the week after next, which MI5 says is a result of "aggressive timescales" for its IT plans. Security clearance could take up to six months however.
The intelligence budget for the next three years is expected to be squeezed at this year's Comprehensive Spending Review. The £2.2bn single intelligence account, which funds all the agencies, is unlikely to be cut much in real terms, but the rapid growth under Labour will surely be arrested.
Lobbying against cuts has already begun. This week The Sun cited "senior security sources" warning that cuts would make an attack on the Olympics more likely.
The head of MI5, Jonathan Evans, told MPs this year he had already launched an internal initiative called "Living Within our Means" in anticipation of tighter budgets. ®
COMMENTS
Small SS budgetary solution.
Find the Sun's senior security sources mole and then sack them!.
No shock here...
The key is being able to do more with less.
The problem with any Bureaucratic Organization is that there is a 'use it or lose it' mentality.
So you want to keep bloated over priced systems in play.
The reality is that you can do a lot more with fewer highly trained, highly compensated, smarter people than hiring many lower grade people. (One of the increasing costs is in staffing.) Looking to cutting edge technology changes and redesigning existing bloated systems is one way to reduce costs over the long haul. Short term costs rise because you can't just shut off the old system while you're building the new system.
So you need a CIO who can calm the politicos and bureaucrats while leading his CTO and team.
Unfortunately there are too many posers who claim to have this skill...
Thumbs up because at least they are facing the reality of tighter budgets, and are actively looking for a solution.
Stuff and Nonsense? I don't think so. It's just too bloody true, to be quietly ignored.
"Because it was originally illegal for GCHQ to spy on its own UK citizens, this problem was easily circumvented by having the US owned Menwith Hill do the dirty work for them. Because of this US control, British MPs trying to ask questions in Parliament about the base just came up against a brick wall. With the introduction of recent far-reaching Acts of Parliament, handing more powers to both GCHQ and MI5, virtually anything goes!" ...... http://www.secret-bases.co.uk/secret4.htm#echelon
So is that who is responsible for the lack of Global Intelligence and Progress and Intelligent Global Progress. Sadly and rather maddingly, is it more a case of nothing is really working rather than virtual anything goes under present executive administrative models. And best that British MPs and their ilk are left out of those loops as they'll only imagine and delude themselves that they are able or even entitled to add input that leads, rather than doing what they are elected to do, which is server the people's pleasure rather than making a pig's ear of things with criminal helpings to server their own pleasures.
All in all, it's a pretty pathetic show which they can all be thoroughly ashamed of being responsible for.
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