In these economic times, how do Whitehall departments and other government bodies plan their IT over the next few years? With boards and ministers demanding more from less, with budgets dramatically reduced, with anxiety-inducing organisational redesigns, what can the Government CIO do to take their people and organisation forward, not back?

I believe there are massive gains to be made despite the cut backs on spend and recruitment. In my years of consultancy I have yet to find an organisation that does not have a function that could be more efficient through a combination of up-skilling and common sense. Anyone who has had the privilege of observing the day to day procedures of any organisation will know what I mean.

I think the answer lies in two mutually dependent areas: increasing the skill, knowledge and judgement of all staff, and a CIO who can make this happen.

What organisations need, now more than ever before, are people from top to bottom who understand technology better, are curious about technology, who want to see what they can do to improve things around them. They need people who are interested in how online collaboration, micro blogging, wikis, RSS and hosted applications can change the way they work. They need to be able to try and evaluate products quickly and with a focus on usability and how easily they can be adopted. They even need to start learning about web services, XML, HTML5, database architecture, standards and agile development.

And to anyone that says we need to think about the business objectives before thinking about the new technology (whether its Amazon EC2 or the Apple iPad) are wrong: you need be thinking about both. New technologies are positively disruptive, they throw up new kinds of business objectives that you couldn't have previously imagined.

There's a huge amount that can be improved in government without resorting to time consuming procurement and change request bureaucracy. And we're in the perfect place to do it. The UK is rapidly becoming a serious rival to Silicon Valley in internet innovation. Indeed London leads the world in usability design (there's a whole blog piece to be written on the usability of big IT project software), and there are ambitious start ups making it their aim to shake up the way we work.

So what about the CIO? Well, their job is to nuture, encourage and inspire. They need to talk to the people (not just their own department) in the language of business, margins and efficiency. They need to reward, not hinder, those people who want to try online services but have been blocked by the firewall. If there are concerns around online privacy and using Web 2.0 apps, they need to be evaluated quickly and optimistically, rather than erecting a barbed-wire fence around innovation and putting a manacle on curiosity.

The CIO should be out there, visible to all, proposing a vision for the future where work flows more smoothly, organisations can react more quickly, and people can enjoy working in a progressive, dynamic environment. This requires personality, not just credentials.

My next post will be on HR and IT - the new special relationship - how to make the technical up-skilling a reality.

P.s. And what about big projects, if there are any left? Well, project management of any large implementation is a whole job in itself. This should be delegated to dedicated project managers: the sort of people who enjoy doing things by the book and will not rest until perfection is met. These people and the CIO are not always the same.