The New Year is all about new beginnings and for Tunde Coker, former director of corporate IT at the Ministry of Justice, this New Year is about a return to the place he can rightly call home.
Having completed his contract with the ministry, Coker is heading to Lagos, Nigeria to become group CIO of Access Bank. As the western economy stutters to a halt and debt dries out liquidity, new economies may benefit. Nigeria is well placed to become the financial leader of Africa and a dominant regional economic player. Hours before flying to Lagos, Tunde Coker shared his thoughts on his journey back to Africa with CIO.
Coker had been with the Ministry of Justice for two years on a fixed-term contract. "They were very supportive," he says. Coker said he "feels he made a difference" at the Ministry. During his career there Coker started out as CTO for Criminal Justice IT before becoming director of corporate IT. He oversaw the £2m introduction of a joined-up IT project that connected information management systems at all levels of the justice structure and the introduction of virtual court rooms. He also rationalised the IT supply deals and developed the blueprint for Justice IT moving forward.
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Coker was instrumental in the introduction of the Criminal Justice Exchange, an online platform for sharing information between the various bodies of the criminal justice world, such as the Crown Prosecution Service, courts, the police and probation services. Stage one of the programme was the Criminal Justice Secure eMail, a system that is used by 15,000 users and has traffic of 500,000 messages a month. Stage two was the Criminal Justice Exchange itself, a secure system for access, exchange and the sharing of judicial information on the web. The Exchange has two business levels, information sharing and information delivery, the second being a set of portals delivering knowledge on the judicial world to users.
Coker describes the Exchange as a "massive middleware project" and he speaks with pride about the reduced opportunities for error in judicial information. "It had to be a very secure environment, yet allow solicitors outside of the legal golden circle inside," he says.
Coker was also responsible for exploring the application of new technologies to facilitate information handling at the Ministry of Justice following the Hannigan Report of late 2008 which sets out how the government needs to improve its information and data security. The Cabinet Office report was commissioned following the HMRC debacle at the close of 2007, when discs containing 25 million personal details were lost, and there was a spate of missing laptops from the Ministry of Defence. Improvements in working culture, scrutiny and technology for monitoring information were recommended by the report.
The Ministry of Justice has not been immune to data losses itself. In August last year it revealed that in a series of separate incidents it had lost the details of 45,000 people. The names, addresses and bank details of 27,000 supplier staff were lost when electronic storage devices were lost.
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