AGIMO’s Alexander appointed Treasury CIO

The Department of Treasury has enlisted the Australian Government Information Management Office’s (AGIMO) Peter Alexander as its new CIO.

Alexander will remain assistant secretary for the AGIMO’s online services branch until he takes up the CIO position on 6 June.

“After 7.5 excellent years at #AGIMO I am leaving to be the CIO at Treasury from 6 June,” Alexander tweeted. “I will miss AGIMO and look forward to the new job.”

Alexander joined AGIMO in September 2002 and has worked on a range of projects including the whole of government telecommunications arrangements, whole of government IT procurement guidance and the original open source software policy.

Alexander said the development of an IT procurement guide back in 2003 was one of his proudest achievements with AGIMO.

“It was really groundbreaking at the time, it was a building model for how agencies would consider open source software and total cost of ownership issues,” Alexander said.

While there had been other documents done around that time none were government focused, or gave agencies an understanding of the breadth and depth of open source and how to compare that with proprietary software, Alexander said.

From 2004, Alexander focused on expanding Fedlink. According to Alexander, the site is now the third most visited government website, attracting just shy of 1 million visitors per month. In 2003, it was around the 30th most visited site.

“That’s been a pleasing thing for me, not just because of the ownership of the site that we have in AGIMO and Finance but more importantly that site is a really useful thing for people dealing with government and it’s a good starting point if you don’t know what to do.”

Alexander also contributed to AGIMO’s Gov 2.0 work.

He established both the online communications platform, Govspace and the public information data site, data.gov.au platforms.

At Treasury he succeeds Alaine King, who held the role for four years from January 2007 until January this year.

King left the CIO role to take up the role of general manager of Medicare Applications at Medicare Australia.

AGIMO has advertised for a successor to Alexander.

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