Arts Council CIO Owen Powell manages a change in scene and service

CIOs in all government sectors will be looking to make major savings and restructure their organisations to meet increasing demands this year but Owen Powell, IT director at the Arts Council, is already well down the road of transformation. We met with Powell at his office just off Whitehall to learn what his peers will need to consider, and the role of IT and the CIO in art.

"People come here as a vocation; a lot of the people here are arts practitioners, one of the executive directors is a poet," Powell says of the non-technical community of users within the organisation he has to support.

"The core function of the Arts Council is the distribution of half a billion pounds a year in arts funding around England. We are also monitoring the outcome of the funding, which is becoming more of a strategic direction."

The Arts Council, in Whitehall parlance, is a Non-Departmental Public Body and reports to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. Its relationship with Whitehall is "arm's length" so that the "government are not making art decisions, the decision making is devolved to us", Powell explains, "We see ourselves as advocates for art, not just the funding body."

"The Arts Council is going through a big transformation at the moment and there is a reduction in people as a result, but more importantly is the shift in how we approach our role," Powell says. "We will be less bureaucratic. Because we are linked to the government we have been perceived as admin-heavy. Well, we now want to be closer to the artistic organisations we fund."

The Arts Council receives its funding from the government every three years and it does come with "strings attached", which at the last payment, made before the credit crisis, was for a reduction in administration costs. A strategy of centralisation and simplification has been running through the organisation since 2002 when the regional and central boards came together.

Powell is keen to stress that the Arts Council has not been cutting jobs just because a mandarin two streets away demands- it. "All of the corporate services went through changes last year," he says of the overall transformation that has been repainting the organisation. "We centralised our IT and relocated it to Manchester along with HR and finance."

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The review demonstrated to Powell that what the Arts Council needed was a helpdesk-centred approach to its operations- and that included IT. As a result, Powell's department now has two divisions, a requirements team and the service desk, and it's not just a helpdesk for IT, but a function that aids the entire organisation and its users, the artistic community of England.

The transformation has meant that for Powell the staffing levels have not changed, just the make-up of his team has altered. He has still managed to reduce costs as well through having a radically different departmental structure.

"The focus is on a wider range of services; we've brought business analysis back in house so we can now convert people's business needs into the systems and we have IT managers to help the different parts of the organisation with the IT side of their departmental projects," he says.

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