Andrew Pinder
British civil servant
Andrew Pinder, CBE, (5 May 1947 – 9 April 2017) led the Office of the e-Envoy from 2000 to 2004, reporting directly to the prime minister, Tony Blair.
He held the post of chairman of Becta (a government agency, funded by the Department for Children, Schools and Families which oversees the e-strategy for Education and supports information and communications technology (ICT) and e-learning in schools and colleges) from January 2006 to January 2009.
He has held many executive posts in the public and private sector relating to IT.
Early life
Pinder was born in 1947. He was educated at the University of Liverpool from 1969 until 1972 where he received a BA in Economics and Geography.
e-Envoy
Pinder's most high-profile position was as the e-Envoy between October 2000 and August 2004, when he was responsible directly to the Prime Minister for coordinating the development of the knowledge economy in the UK.
In this role, he gave a speech at the CBI in November 2001.
He oversaw the rapid implementation in 2001 of the Government Gateway, a project for putting all the government services online, which was built by Microsoft in just 15 weeks and initially locked out all browsers except Microsoft's own Internet Explorer. He defended this by claiming that the limitation applied only to the part "which allows citizens and businesses to enrol for services. [But] once enrolled, they can submit transactions from any operating system, since XML - the language used - is totally platform independent."
The deal also involved Microsoft using UK government intellectual property to build products for other governments in order to recoup some of the costs of building the technology. The rate of return was to the tune of 22% of their gross sales of the intellectual property, which Pinder hoped would "give us quite a lot of money". This hope was reiterated by a minister for the Cabinet Office as late as January 2003.
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