John Suffolk, the UK government’s chief information officer, is to step down at the end of this year, according to reports from TechMarketView and ComputerworldUK.

“Suffolk’s decision won’t come as a great surprise to many in the UK public sector,” wrote TechMarketView analyst Tola Sargeant yesterday. “We’d long suspected that he would prefer not to spend another four years in the role and might … hand the baton to someone new once the coalition government had bedded in”.

No successor has yet been announced, though Sargeant believes that Suffolk’s successor is likely to be a “close ally” of Ian Watmore, the government’s chief operating officer and Suffolk’s predecessor as CIO.

Suffolk was appointed to the role in 2006, having previously been Director General of Criminal Justice IT (CJIT). He has recently overseen the groundwork for the government’s ‘G-Cloud’ shared services initiative and, since the coalition came to power earlier this year, has helped Cabinet Office minister Franics Maude renegotiate contracts with all of the UK public sector’s main IT suppliers.