Head of egovernment Ian Watmore has a wide brief. He is head of the IT profession across Whitehall, and will be responsible for setting architectural standards, encouraging departments and agencies to 'join up', and helping improve the success rate of major IT programmes.

Watmore joined the newly-created eGovernment Unit (eGU) at the Cabinet Office last month, from his former role as UK managing director of Accenture. The eGU replaces the Office of the eEnvoy , which was set up in 1999 with the aim of both developing egovernment services and encouraging citizens and businesses to get online.

The eGU has a very different role, says Watmore.

'The eEnvoy's work is deemed to be done - the UK is perceived to be vibrant place in the ecommerce world and the responsibilities that still remain in that area are being taken forward by individual departments focussing naturally in that space.

'My role is much more analogous to that of a group chief information officer (CIO) in a conglomerate or large enterprise and is essentially about taking a view across all of its services, either to external citizens or within itself,' he said.

Where former eEnvoy Andrew Pinder was predominantly focused on online services, Watmore's role covers the full breadth of government IT.

'That means the big transaction-processing systems at heart of government, supporting benefit payments or tax collection or whatever, and also encompasses corporate systems that sit behind them like the human resources (HR) and finance systems the government uses to manage itself,' he said.

The eGU's first major task is to put together a group of CIOs from across Whitehall departments, agencies and local government to build the 'team culture' Watmore sees as essential to overcomimg the tendency for different areas of government to work in isolation.

'The job is to try to get the group to recognise areas where they would do better by working together rather than in individual silos,' said Watmore.

A key area is the development of the government's internal IT and programme management skills.

'My position as head of the IT profession in government is arguably one of the most pivotal roles and I can only discharge that if the rest of the CIOs in government buy in to that approach.

'The question is how can we collectively improve the capacity and capability of people in government to implement IT enabled-projects more successfully than in the past,' said Watmore.

'That is an agenda for both the medium term - building skills progressively over time so we have larger numbers of people able to operate in these areas - and also the short term because there is a lot of stuff now, like the Efficiency Review and the NHS National Programme, that requires IT for change,' he said.

Government needs a way of identifying its experienced staff and ensuring both that their skills are developed and that they are aware of opportunities as they arise.

'We need to ensure the best people that are already here are following the biggest opportunities,' said Watmore.

After only a month in the job, the full line-up for the CIO group is yet to be finalised but Watmore hopes it will meet for the first time before Christmas. While personal priorities such as the need for a cross-government view of skill capabilities will be on the agenda, the primary aim is to listen to what CIOs have to say.

'I have ideas and priorities to put into the debate but I want to listen to what other people want to do - there is plenty of time to influence, I want to understand first,' said Watmore.

Watmore considers it no handicap that his office will rely on the powers of persuasion rather than the more direct coercion of a major budget.

'There are some very strong delivery capabilities inside the departments concerned and we have a better chance of succeeding if we can get those people to operate as a team and develop the agenda for themselves that then take back to their individual departments,' he said.

Government departments respond better to reasoned argument than central diktats, he says.

'I don't think you get real buy-in from big centralised projects, they just become pieces of expenditure that people emotionally rail against.

'I favour building a team of people who see the need for a common idea or infrastructure or whatever and are prepared to pool the funding to make it work,' he said.

The size and scale of the programmes already underway make it impractical to run them all from the centre. Strong departmental accountability with a credible central unit to tackle genuinely pan-governmental issues is the right approach, says Watmore.

'In my experience that is the way government operates best - central roles actually have to win over the people through argument and personal credibility and by building a team of people.

'Things work less well when the centre tries to dictate,' he said.

There is plenty of enthusiasm out there, it is just a question of tapping into it.

'I genuinely believe that people in government do want to see the whole of government succeed and there is a serious frustration that not enough public service reform has succeeded because of problems in implementing IT programmes behind the scenes,' said Watmore.

'That is very strong source to tap into: everyone wants to do this for public service reform reasons, not IT reasons, and that is where we can win the hearts and minds of people concerned,' he said.