The South Australia Government's Chief Information Officer (CIO), Grantly Mailes, tended his resignation late last week, leaving the role after almost three years in the job.

"I'll be leaving at the end of January and taking a new role after a short holiday," Mailes said.

Mailes said the decision to end his time as CIO was due to a number of contributing factors; the timing suited him as he was approaching the end of a 3 year contract, and a promising new position had become available.

He was unable to provide details on his new employment but said it will be in his home state of Victoria, which will bring a welcome relief from almost three years of commuting from Melbourne to Adelaide for work.

"It's not the biggest commute I've done, before that I spent a long time being a management consultant and the role I am taking is back in consulting. I'll be spending a fair bit of time back in my home state for the first time in a long time," he said.

Mailes also explained that his work with the South Australian government was arriving at a logical break point. He said his departure from the job is on "excellent" terms.

"After 32 months we'll have gotten to a point where we've made some fairly big changes here, and at a strategic level we probably need a person with different skills around for long term implementation, and that just isn't me," he said.

One of the most significant projects under Mailes' charge was the SA government's Future ICT program, which replaced a 10-year long agreement the state government had with EDS on infrastructure.

"We've had a three to four year program to replace the EDS contract with multiple vendors. I've lived through most of it, and we're now in the final negotiations with the last of those contracts and we expect those to come to conclusion in a matter of weeks," he said.

Mailes said he would look back on Future ICT as a "successful project that's delivered savings", adding that "it's time now for government to look at other parts of procurement, and there's a whole other story that we're heading into now".

Mailes believes his biggest accomplishment working with the South Australian government was achieving "a cultural and operational shift" in the way government thinks about IT and its contribution to service delivery.

"We released publicly our IT strategy about a month ago and some of that calls for some fairly large reforms that the sector has agreed to undertake, and I think that is probably the biggest thing - the cultural shift to accept fairly large transformational change in IT".

He said the South Australian government's office of the CIO will prepare a press announcement later in the week that will fully detail his decisions for moving on and his new role.

Mailes said no information was yet available on who would replace him.