Mike Stone, the chief information officer at the Ministry of Defence, is to leave the civil service at the end of the financial year.
The Ministry of Defence will say goodbye to Mike Stone in March 2017 – Photo credit: PA
Stone, who has been at the MoD since May 2014, has handed given the department six months’ notice of his intention to leave in March 2017.
Although the MoD has not issued a formal statement on the move, a spokeswoman confirmed to PublicTechnology that Stone was planning to leave, but that no further plans had been made for after his departure.
The news makes Stone the latest in a line of high-profile departures from senior government digital roles, including HMRC’s Mark Dearnley, the Home Office’s Norm Driskell and Stephen Foreshew-Cain’s sudden exit from the Government Digital Service.
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Before joining the MoD, Stone had a 28-year career in the army, ending in 2002, at which time he was the chief information officer. He spent the next decade in industry, with eight years in BT, before moving to the civil service.
He recently oversaw the department’s efforts to transfer all its data from secure networks to the cloud, after Microsoft opened its first UK datacentres, allowing public sector bodies to store sensitive data without it having to leave the country.
The move was part of the department’s digital transformation agenda, with Stone saying at the time that much of the MoD’s legacy equipment was outdated and the services it used were “unfit for purpose”.