Chief digital officer for Scottish local government amongst UK’s top 100 

The chief digital officer for Scottish Local Government, Martyn Wallace, has made the UK’s CIO 100, a celebration of chief information officers and technology executives driving transformation in their organisations.

The 2018 CIO 100 was launched at a reception in London last Thursday, and Wallace joined the top 100 alongside other CIO’s and CTO’s including David Henderson, director of technology and operations at Global Radio, Mark Holt, chief technology officer at Trainline, and Graeme K Hackland, CIO at Williams F1.

Wallace was recognised for his work leading the Digital Office for Scottish Local Government which was formed in October 2016, following 30 of Scotland’s local authorities joining forces to drive digital transformation.

One of the key projects has seen the recruitment of two councils to lead, produce, and share a toolkit on the EU’s General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR), resulting in costs of over £1million being avoided for councils in the Digital Partnership. 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.

He has largely overcome a “failure-allergic culture by stressing the positives of failing fast with only some budget committed, rather than the traditional long-tail delivery where failure is identified late and expensively,” said the citation.

Wallace commented: “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.”

Also named in the CIO 100 is Claudette Jones, chief information officer at the West of Scotland University.