Jos Creese becomes BCS president as he retires from CIO role

Veteran public sector CIO Jos Creese has been inaugurated as the next President of the chartered institute for IT, the BCS announced at its AGM today. Creese is currently CDO of Hampshire County Council, having changed job title from CIO. Creese will retire and go freelance as a business technology consultant in May 2015. Ray Long, a Director at the Department for Work and Pensions, has been named as Deputy President.

In a statement Creese said: “This is an exciting time to be part of the Institute as technology increasingly dominates our lives and our work. During this year I particularly want to help BCS to reach new members, and especially to encourage more IT apprenticeships. We must excite young people, whatever their background, about IT careers, by showing how varied the roles can be and how significant the contribution IT professionals is for digital businesses and governments”.

Creese has over 25 years IT management experience and was recently been appointed as the interim Chief Digital Officer and lead digital advisor for Hampshire County Council, moving from the CIO role he held there for over a decade. As CIO for Hampshire County Council his responsibilities included service innovation and business improvement through IT-enabled transformational programmes and the IT team has won numerous awards for innovative IT projects.

Creese regularly advises private companies on technology and market trends. In 2006, he set up the Local Public Services CIO Council which he chaired until 2014, and is a past president of SOCITM, the Society of IT Management.

As CIO at Hampshire the council  successfully implemented a wide range of IT-enabled programmes – ‘workstyle’, the customer-service centre ‘Hantsdirect’, and much of the share IT infrastructure such as SAP and the Hampshire Public Services Network (HPSN) on which the new self-service functions are built.

Ray Long, who takes up the role of Deputy President alongside Creese, is a Director at the Department for Work and Pensions, where he is currently responsible for the organisation’s Infrastructure Modernisation Programme.  Long has previously served in a number of other Government Departments and is also an Associate Lecturer with The Open University.