Joanna Davinson appointed Chair of the Board of Directors

Crown Hosting are thrilled to welcome Joanna Davinson as newly appointed Chair of the Board of Directors, as the digital transformation of the public sector continues to progress.

Joanna brings to the role over 30 years’ experience of technology-enabled transformation at scale and has spent most of her career focused on delivering services to the public sector. Initially training as an archaeologist, after university she joined the National Audit Office as a civil servant and trained to be an accountant.

This led Joanna to work as a Management Consultant and Programme Director for PwC, where she dealt with public sector clients, mainly in the health and education sectors. She also worked in enterprise resource planning (ERP) where her financial skills prevailed. When IBM bought PwC Consulting in 2002, Joanna was transferred over to IBM and it was then that the IT part of her career really began as part of her senior leadership role.

Learning about various new technologies and how those new technologies can be utilised to transform services became Joanna’s passion and she flourished in this fast-paced and high delivering environment. In her last position at IBM, Joanna was general manager of its European Public Sector Consulting and Systems Integration Business.

In 2017, Joanna realised her next role within IBM would take her further away from public sector work, so she followed her passion and moved to the Home Office as their CIO. She cites this as; “…a brilliant move as it took me back into operational delivery at a time when there was huge change going on at the Home Office.”

It was at this point that she was introduced and initially involved with Crown Hosting (CH), as they were rationalising how to deal with the Home Office estate and legacy systems. Joanna describes CH as; “…one of the solutions that was going to help us move forward on that journey.”

Joanna continued in that role for 3 years before moving to central government as the UK Government’s Chief Digital Officer; the most senior digital role in government. Here she was responsible for setting direction and cross government digital, data and technology strategy as well as performance managing departments to implement.

During this time, she continued her commitment to CH and; “…always felt it should have a central role in terms of the government’s strategy around how it’s going to address its legacy problem and move into a more efficient way of delivering IT.”

Joanna elected to retire from full time work in September 2022. Since then, she’s become a non-executive director for HS2 and is excited to be working with CH again as Chair of the Board of Directors. There appears to be a sense of “unfinished business with CH” and Joanna is delighted to have the opportunity to be able to push their strategy further as she feels there is more that CH can do for both government strategy and plans.

Joanna’s vast experience of dealing with public sector clients combined with her genuine interest in change will enable her to assist CH in continuing to create value for clients using new technologies and experiences. Her social and ethical values align well with CH too; “Some other things I really value about CH are the ethics…from an environmental perspective it’s so focused on being as environmentally efficient and capable as possible. The fact that it’s very forward leaning in terms of supporting transition to Cloud, even though they’re an on-premise data centre…the sense of genuinely wanting to do good in the world.”

It’s clear that Joanna sees the real value that CH can offer and feels that there’s a lot more it could do to support government and deliver better public sector services to citizens. She states; “I have a strong personal belief in the mission that CH has and I want the company to succeed, but I also want to see it reach its full potential as a partner for government.”

In terms of timing from an administration point of view, Joanna feels this is a great opportunity for CH to show what it can do.