Not long ago, IT managers wanting to earn £100,000 a year had to aim their CVs firmly at banks and stockbrokers. Now, if a recent spate of job ads is anything to go by, the six-figure lure is becoming de rigueur for senior IT posts in Whitehall, the NHS and even local authorities.
Last week, the Department for Work and Pensions offered a "six figure package" for a strategic IT sourcing director. Guy's and St Thomas' Hospital in London advertised £100,000 for a director of information technology and telecommunications. With local authority chief executives' top salaries nudging £150,000, it would be strange if some council IT heads are not already pulling in more than £100K.
When public sector salaries start to catch the eye, the usual reaction is to hush them up. No one wants to be labelled "council fat cat of the week" in some tabloid campaign.
This temptation should be resisted. First, because banks and the like are hiring again, so government bodies need to try a bit harder to attract good staff.
Second, high salaries are a public affirmation that these people are doing an important job. If paying a chief information officer £100,000 plus a year brings in efficiency savings and service improvements worth many times that, public bodies shouldn't be afraid to shout about it. After all, these high-paying jobs aren't about IT as much as what management consultants call outcome-oriented IT-enabled business change.
This applies even to e-govern ment. One symptom is the new strings attached, reportedly at the Treasury's insistence, to central funding for online local government. The latest and final round of funding (£500,000 for each authority, regardless of size or progress) is tied to councils achieving so-called "priority outcomes".
Some IT managers argue that dictating what local authorities put online is at odds with the spirit of new localism, let alone with the prime minister's change of heart about targets. They are whistling in the wind - the Treasury wants its pound of flesh, and those who don't deliver will be punished.
The high-paying NHS jobs involve even more pressure. Few people think that e-government will swing the outcome of the next general election. Not so the NHS National Programme for IT, especially the component with the highest political profile - electronic appointment-booking. Hospital IT chiefs will be expected not only to install these systems but ensure that doctors use them. They will also find themselves caught between their chief executives, who will expect the new systems to be paid entirely from the programme's £5bn central budget and their IT suppliers, who will come up with a long list of items that hospitals have to fund.
In central government, the rod on the back is the Gershon review of Whitehall. As one of Gershon's implied messages is that government departments no longer need their own IT departments, the new £100K managers will be going into the post with the intention of making themselves redundant.
Funny sort of fat cat.
