Home Office IT director takes G-Cloud reins

Denise McDonagh, the Home Office's director of IT, is set to lead the government's G-Cloud project after the previous head announced plans to retire.

McDonagh will take over from Chris Chant, who is retiring from the role of G-Cloud Programme lead, on 30 April, the Cabinet Office announced on Friday.

"Denise will keep her existing role at the Home Office — which doesn't mean to say that G-Cloud is a part time role, only that she'll be even busier than she is now," the G-Cloud Programme wrote in a blog.

Before taking up the role at the Home Office, McDonagh was deputy chief information officer for Defra and head of IT services for the Department of Health.

Alongside news of his retirement, Chant wrote a blogpost on Wednesday lamenting the use of "unacceptable IT" within the public sector.

"Real progress has been blocked by many things including an absence of capability in both departments and their suppliers, by a strong resistance to change, by the perverse incentives of contracts that mean its cheaper to pay service credits than to fix the problem and by an unwillingness to embrace the potential of newer and smaller players to offer status quo-busting ideas," he wrote. "CIOs across government, including me in various roles at the centre of government, have been guilty for too long of taking the easy path."

Chant had shaped the G-Cloud 'CloudStore' project, which launched in mid-February to provide a central procurement site for public sector organisations to use when choosing IT contracts. Another aim of CloudStore was to make it easier for small businesses to compete with large IT companies on public contracts.