What can we say about an entity that still publishes its most important documents on the skins of calves… but which is also putting wi-fi into as many nooks of its Victorian HQ as physically possible – and which has committed to being mostly Cloud-based within two years?

Welcome to, in fact, your own country. Because, as Joan Miller, Head of Parliamentary ICT in Westminster told delegates at last week’s Cloud Expo Europe, that’s the apparent contradictory state of affairs in ‘the Mother of Parliaments’: an odd mixture of old and new that seems to work.

It’s also a situation which is constantly changing, too. “When I look back at 2005, the ICT culture already looks very different,” she says. “Then it was all about desktops, lots of paper and locked-down, centralised IT: the two year project was the norm. Now we know ICT will completely change in 18 months and the best you can do as the CIO is plan for no more than one year ahead – and look for the three month, not the two year, project cycle we normally plan for in the public sector.”

Miller tells a tale familiar, I am sure, to most PublicTechnology.net subscribers: one where strategic issues – security, cybercrime, reliability – has to be balanced versus operational – the relentless drive to achieve cost savings and boost efficiency. Her case, though, is made a bit more complicated by the fact that part of her database goes back 700 years, to the ancient vellum (that calfskin stuff, which was leading-edge printing tech in its day, remember) rolls of the first Parliamentary statutes.

And by the behaviour of its users – probably just like yours. “We have a group of users who are already using iPads, who want to work in a very mobile, face to face way – the whole of Parliament is a working space, remember, not just the two Chambers. They want their own devices and data when they need it.”

Miller is convinced that Cloud and wi-fi has to be a big part of the solution to balancing old structures and new demands. She has embarked on a major Cloud readiness project that has already seen around 13 Terabytes of information moved over to Amazon, piloting of some SaaS (software as a service), a goal of an April 2013 migration to Cloud-based email and exploration of how and where the approach can deliver more.

Interestingly, it’s looking as if it’s going to be a mixed picture – a bit of vellum and wi-fi co-existing again, if you will. “We are probably going to end up a purchaser of Cloud services, in the plural, and probably not working with just one Cloud supplier, either. We can also see a mixture of public, G-Cloud and on-site.”

And to nail down just why Parliament is doing all this: “Cloud suits our pattern of work and also, frankly, costs less,” she declares. “It’s cheaper for me to buy two iPads than one encrypted laptop, for example.

I think it’s fascinating that an institution as important as the Houses of Parliament is so committed to making ICT suit the needs of its users, not constraining them to ICT. I am also very struck by how pragmatic Miller’s approach is: this is no ‘Cloud zealot,’ this is a CIO looking to craft the most flexible and appropriate solution she can, within the fiscal constraints she is being presented with.

You may not have to publish your most important documents on vellum. But I’m sure you can find a lot of commonality with the lady in charge of tech for our House of Commons.

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