Education department loses CIO

The Department of Education and Training has put out the call for a new chief information officer after losing its last tech chief.

CIO Mark Sawade has headed up the department’s IT shop since moving from the then Department of Immigration and Border Protection in May 2017.

But as of early this year he will transfer to the department’s Schools and Youth cluster after accepting a promotion, a spokesperson told iTnews.

Peter Rundell is currently acting in the CIO position, which doubles as the head of the Digital and Business Transformation branch.

The department is now looking for a “highly motivated” CIO with “well-developed change management skills” to lead the department’s IT transformation agenda.

“The CIO will be responsible for leading the department’s ICT transformation towards a data-driven and evidence-based approach to policy design and decision making,” the job ad reads.

Reporting to the head of the Finance, Technology and Business Services cluster, the SES Band 1 exec will be expected to develop “new services aligned with whole-of-government initiatives such as solution design and engineering and user research and engagement”.

There is also a need for the incoming CIO to “provide ICT security advice to reflect the department’s cloud-provisioning approach”.

The successful applicant will join at a time when the department is still recovering from the bungled national apprenticeship management IT system, a reboot of which it has since attempted.

The department is also currently working on a number of other major programs, including a new platform to collect student data from higher education and vocational education training programs - the integrated tertiary system platform (ITSP).

It also received funding in the 2018 federal budget for a VET student loan IT solution, which is expected to be delivered through the platform developed for the Department of Human Services’ Welfare Payment Infrastructure Transformation program.