Metropolitan Police hires BG Group's Angus McCallum as new CIO

McCallum may have been offered a salary of up to £200k, but he has a huge task on his hands

The Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) has finally hired a CIO, nearly nine months after posting a job advert for the role on its website.

The organisation has hired Angus McCallum, who has been global CIO of multinational oil and gas company BG Group for the last five years.

The Met Police said that McCallum will also join the MPS management board, and will be tasked with implementing Digital Policing's significant transformation plans, including the introduction of a new target operating model, appointment of Digital Policing's senior leadership team, and delivering the savings that the Met needs to make.

"Over the next three to four years we envisage an unprecedented transformation of our technology," said Craig Mackey, deputy commissioner at MPS.

"Under Angus' stewardship, we will deliver the transformation to equip our officers with cutting edge mobile technology, enabling them provide a faster and more effective response to crime across London.

"We will implement a series of new fast and flexible online services that will also allow Londoners to interact with us in different ways. Angus brings solid experience to help shape these changes and will, I am sure, make an outstanding contribution in delivering the step change in the MPS ICT capability," he said.

The job at hand

McCallum, will have a huge task on his hands, as the MPS has been criticised heavily for its approach to IT in the past few years, particularly by the London Assembly's Budget and Performance Committee.

In an investigation into how the Met could improve its spending on technology, it found that up to 30,000 new mobile devices that were to be distributed to officers could end up as "costly paperweights". It also found that many officers were still using desktop PCs that took more than half-an-hour to boot.

Since then, the MPS unveiled a new Total Technology strategy, intended to transform crime fighting in London. The strategy, which runs until 2017, will incorporate a £200m investment over three years. At the time, MPS claimed that it would enable ongoing IT costs to be cut by 30 per cent.

In March last year, MPS revealed that it was looking to outsource its software development capabilities in a plan that will see just 100 staff retained out of a current workforce of 800 - this at a time when a large number of organisations are looking to bring software development in-house.

A few months later, the Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime, Stephen Greenhaigh, approved a mega £216m 10-year deal with private firm Shared Services Connected Limited (SSCL), to outsource three of the Met's back-office departments - a deal Computing suggested could be the next government IT disaster.

It is no wonder that with so many issues to contend with, the Met Police attempted to entice candidates for the CIO role with a £200,000 salary.

The selected candidate, McCallum, spoke to Computing back in 2014 about his role at BG Group, which involved leading a team of 200 IT staff and managing the infrastructure of a company with more than 5,000 employees in over 20 countries. BG Group is now in the process of being acquired by oil giant Shell for just under £50bn.