Joan Miller
Director of ICT, the UK Parliament
Joan Miller is Director of Parliamentary ICT (Information, Communication, and Technology) for the United Kingdom Parliament and sits on the management boards of both the House of Commons and the House of Lords. She was recruited to set up a new department in 2005, centralizing nine separate ICT offices to create a new and more strategic ICT function for the UK Parliament.
In previous roles Ms. Miller managed community development programs and European partnerships, becoming involved in managing ICT in 1993. She managed award-winning ICT programs and services in local government in Essex, Suffolk, and London from 1993–2003, in the course of which she centralized ICT services three times and established substantial organization-wide change and savings programs to create new contact centers, new face-to-face services, and new transactional web services for citizens. She also led two UK national projects in this period, one to connect electronic information and records across several organizations and the other to set standard methodologies for public sector programs and project management.
Ed Yourdon: One of the things that I’ve been quite curious about with everyone I’ve spoken to is basically how you get to a position like this. Obviously, you weren’t born a CIO—but had you been a CIO at previous organizations or was this your first appointment?
Joan Miller: I should probably tell you a little bit about my earlier career, because it is relevant. I did an economics degree. Which I think is quite unusual for CIOs.
Yourdon: You’d be amazed at the variety. The CIO of the New York Stock Exchange has a PhD in chemistry, so I’m no longer surprised by anything. But economics in your case.
Miller: Economics lives between science and art. And I think the CIO job lives between science and art with what people do with technology. And that’s why it’s not so unusual. There are a number of CIOs who also come from the social sciences. I began working in an insurance company.
Yourdon: Ahh.
Miller: But I took a 14-year gap to have children. So I was not working other than caring for the children for 14 years, and I did lots of voluntary work in that period. When I came back to work I was working with community development, which is a long way from IT.
Yourdon: That’s true.
Miller: But when I was organizing voluntary organizations that work with social care services, in Essex—a part of that was project planning. It was business planning, project planning for a voluntary center, creating contracts with the social care services to provide services, and that’s very much a people-based, but organizational planning–based role. And then I moved and worked for the director of social services, doing a staff officer-type job, and that meant that I did anything that wasn’t social work that the director needed done. When I was working in that area, I was working on things like voluntary sector development, European policy, and projects. And then this new topic of information management came along.
Yourdon: Ahh, I see.
Miller: I’m talking the early 1990s here, we were looking at information management as the big development for social care, in order to be able to keep records. In 1993 we did a very big project, a community care project, which was about creating in an eight-week period a paper–based records system that crossed all of the council’s social care services. It was primarily for older people, people with disabilities, and people with mental health problems. Looking at the workflow process and how you could record the record of the individual being helped by social services when that individual would see a lot of different social workers and care workers. We did it all on paper in 1993.
Miller: When I’d finished that project, the director said to me, “So, what’s your next project?” And I said, “Well, I think you should computerize this. I think databases do this work much better than paper,” because we had 30 different forms in the process.
Yourdon: Mmm.
Miller: And for each one you had to do basic repetitious stuff, like write names and addresses and relationships on each form, and the obvious opportunity is to create an electronic record that would do that for you. I wasn’t thinking very much more than just being able to transfer information from one form to the next and build up a record. So we went into a period of looking at what computer systems might work. And we were lucky, I think, to find a computer system specifically for social care but which was a very well-structured computer system. I learned my IT data management, project management from that project.
Yourdon: Ahh, I see.
Miller: Buying a computer system that works and that social workers could use. Social workers are not the easiest people to persuade to use computers — their focus is much more on the person they’re working with than it is on the computer they need to give them the information, and they were very much at that time used to writing paper records, long files, so my introduction to big-time computing as opposed to home and personal computing was managing and leading a project to implement an electronic social care record.
Yourdon: Interesting. Well, there’s a related question then for which you might give a very different answer than from what I’ve heard, and that is the question of role models or mentors along the way, because I would imagine they might have been somewhat different than what I’ve been hearing from other interviews.
Miller: I’ll take a little roundabout way to give you the answer to this question. Having implemented a social care record in Essex, which is quite hard work, one of the things I really discovered is that in a social care organization, you need good leadership. Unless the leadership understands what you’re going to do and what you’re trying to do, implementing technology doesn’t work.
The next job I was headhunted to Suffolk and implemented a social care computer electronic record system there. And probably the most important lesson from Essex was the need to engage with the senior management. And the person who influenced me probably the most in Suffolk was the Director of Social Services there, who although he did not know about computers or technology, his point was that this technology would be good. And so he invited me, not as director, but as the head of information management, to sit with him and his directors on their management board.
Yourdon: Okay.
Miller: So he allowed me to give strategic input to the business and decisions being made from an electronic record and support role. That meant that when we developed the electronic record at Suffolk, it had primary support from somebody who thought it was a good thing, with the freedom to work with Directors to find out why it was a good thing, and the authority to work with the users to help them to invent the use of the system, so that I wasn’t implementing technology. I was implementing a new way of working.
Yourdon: Hmm. Okay.
Miller: And so my prejudices around CIOs is not that they’re technology-based, but that they are work-based. It’s how people work that’s important. Technology just supports it.
Yourdon: Okay, fair enough.
Miller: Now there are two things that came out of that. One is that you have to mediate, I think, as the head of information anyway, between what packages do, what systems do, and what users want to do. You don’t just go with the choice of the user because you may not be able to support the technology. But neither do you implement a perfect technology and expect users to adapt their working practices without understanding what they’re trying to achieve in their work.
And I think the principle of all IT management that I’ve had experience with is around that mediation CIO role, which is about discovering what is it the business wants to do and finding the technology that supports what they want to do, and the negotiation with the business that says, “Don’t go window-shopping for IT systems; come and let’s work out the principles. We’re the experts in technology, or at least I know some friends who are who work for me. Let’s make technology that supports your workflow that we can then support and that works together across the piece.”
Yourdon: Okay.
Miller: So I think the Director of Social Services at Suffolk was probably a key influence then because he was an enabler of technology. He didn’t understand it, but he enabled it.
Yourdon: A champion, so to speak. Very interesting.
Miller: A champion, yeah. I think another person was also very influential, and that was the owner of the company, the software house, that we bought the system from. He was influential because he had a huge understanding of how to simplify IT. And I learned from him around the principles of data management, data flows, simplification, and the ability to give the same result to many different people by showing them a screen that looked the way they wanted it to look, but built into a common database. So I learned about simplifying IT, but providing it in a very intuitive way to users and how important that was.
Yourdon: Interesting. There’s one last introductory question that I’m curious about. When people start to become groomed or moving in a career path toward a CIO, some of them have had additional education or training, and some have not. And I’m just curious, did they send you off to school, to CIO school of any sort?
Miller: No.
Yourdon: So all on-the-job training?
Miller: I don’t think I’ve had any specific CIO training. I’ve had business management training, more generic training. I’ve been to many conferences. I’ve been to good practice-sharing groups with other people who are aspirational CIOs. But I’ve never had any specific training. I’m perhaps of a generation before the people who did the specific training. I don’t think there were many courses around for CIOs, in the early 1990s.
Yourdon: [laughter] Probably not.
Miller: But I think also this role of CIO is not a Technology Officer. It’s about a business manager who is that translator between business requirements, and therefore the training in the business skills is as important as the training in the technology or the understanding of the technology. So my training has been much more about organizational change. And I’ve had some good training on organizational change. It’s been about principles of business management, not about technology. I rely on other people to be experts in technology.
Yourdon: Okay, interesting. All right, probably the central question I’ve been asking everybody, for which the answers are all over the place, is how you see information technology playing a role to make your constituents, or the people you serve, more effective. What are your dreams in terms of using it to make the world a better place?
Miller: That’s a really good question because I work in the public sector. And I work in the public sector because that’s my driving motive, to make the world a better place.
Yourdon: Ahh.
Miller: So why am I in technology? I would say by accident. And I would say the accident is that experience working in Essex when the Director said, “Go do the computer system.” So my experience, and just what happens in IT, is about using IT to make organizations work more efficiently. It’s about being able to control the information flows to help people be more efficient; to be able to automate the stuff to make the organization cheaper and more efficient. About the end of the 1990s, I think it was about ’98, the big word “e-government” came out.
Yourdon: Mm-hmm.
Miller: And I was in that bandwagon of people who were saying, “E-government is an incredibly important force to change the way (local government is where I was working then) government works,” so rather than being an organization that thinks itself as silo departments, it becomes an organization that’s customer-focused, that says to the customer, “You are members of the public, residents of the local authority. You have a collection of things that you need from this authority. How would you like to interact with the authority?”
And the principle then was to create customer service–focused, front-end services to the county council, to make them easier to approach and work with. To make it easier. If you had a problem that crossed social care and education and some of the other services of the county council, you didn’t have to go in five different doors to find the services you needed as an individual, but you could go into one door, and from that one door the person in the front-office service would connect you to the services you needed.
Yourdon: Okay.
Miller: In fact, this is the New Brunswick model in Canada. I was very influenced by reading about those services, where they had done things about more efficient front-line services that allowed the resident, the citizen, to access those services in a more intuitive way. When I was in social services, if you looked at the kinds of services provided, the management team was focused on 10 percent of the customers who had high-level needs and had high-level costs. Ninety percent of the customers with low-level needs and low-level costs were in queues waiting to see the social workers.
Yourdon: Aha. Interesting.
Miller: And the way we were able to restructure the organization was to create front-office services to give them the information they needed or even to be able to say, “We can’t help you with this problem because it doesn’t meet our criteria, but you can try this service.” We were able to put in a service that gave a faster, quicker, more responsive service to that citizen than the 90 percent of people who just got stuck in long queues. Also, note that the 10 percent who needed intensive social worker input were able to get to the social worker because there wasn’t such a long queue.
Yourdon: Ahh, interesting.
Miller: And that’s about—it was not about saving money, although we did, but it was actually about making the organization more responsive to the person who wanted that service. That is how I see IT working, because IT was able to support the front-office service and connect the information back to knowledge and workflow and processes that allowed the 90 percent, the people who were dealing with the 90 percent, who had fewer qualifications to effectively deal consistently with the members of the public and enable them to pass back to the social workers those who did need higher levels of care in a quicker, faster, and therefore cheaper way.
Yourdon: Now you say this movement began in the late ’90s, so it’s now more than ten years old. Do you still think it has a long way to go, or is it fairly well established at this point?
Miller: I think in many local government areas it’s well established. I think there are many services government provides, both from central government and local government and other quango-type organizations, which are still not connected. There are some very good developments in thinking, but it’s such a big problem in the public sector to connect everything up. So it’s a long time scale.
Yourdon: Does it become progressively more difficult as you go from a local government focus to a national focus?
Miller: Yeah.
Yourdon: Is it a linear scale or an exponential scale?
Miller: It’s an exponential scale. It’s easier to deal and partner with the people you can see. It is much more difficult to deal with people who are remote to you and to trust and partner, because working together—for instance, in the late ’90s, early 2000s to today, Health and Social Care, which is a national and a local organization, have been working much more closely together. That’s supported by electronic records.
Yourdon: Ahh, okay.
Miller: That’s a national organization dealing with a local organization, so two different trust environments needing to work together.
Yourdon: And exchange information. Appropriate information.
Miller: Confidential information.
Yourdon: I was going to say, “With all the privacy issues associated with that.”
Miller: And that’s been quite fascinating to see. The developments probably took five years to get off the ground, because nobody knew how to do it. I’m not at all sure that there’s comprehensive coverage yet, but there are some very good areas of good practice.
Yourdon: Okay.
Miller: There is the ability now to share information because people mostly work on electronic records. I suppose the working population have become more familiar with working on electronic records. When I was talking back in the mid-’90s, when I was implementing social care systems, this was anathema to social workers.
Yourdon: Hmm.
Miller: I think most are now used to it and indeed demand mobile electronic information, which was a big thing. But the ability to share information with Health has become an expectation rather than a threat. So the mind changes affect the use.
Yourdon: Mm-hmm.
Miller: And I think the role of the CIO is to keep track with and push, when necessary, the agenda. And I think constructive input from the CIO can change the world, or at least a little bit of the world. You have an influence by helping organizations to share and therefore partner and work together, and therefore the citizen gets a better deal.
Yourdon: Now you had mentioned that the buzzword that kind of launched all of this 10, 12 years ago was “e-government.” Another one that I wrote down here that we’re hearing a lot now about is “Government 2.0” as the counterpart of Web 2.0 or Enterprise 2.0. Is that something that has become significant here in the UK?
Miller: I think that that was always significant. I think that right from the end of the 1990s we were saying, “So how—if we’re taking people through the door or on a telephone service, can we even prevent that by giving them Internet information and transactional services?” I think that Health is probably one of the organizations that has gone the farthest to help diagnostic information appear to the citizen on the Web.
Yourdon: Hmm, interesting.
Miller: And they’ve done that from early 2000 onwards. I think that’s developed in a very intensive way. I think the complexity of how we provide services makes it really difficult for citizens to interact on the Web in a comprehensive way, but there are some very good examples. Having said that, there are some very good examples of how government is now trading, doing transactions with citizens through web-based services.
Yourdon: Mm-hmm.
Miller: So income tax forms you can do entirely on the Web. Things like driver vehicle licensing, you can do entirely on the Web, and it’s so much easier for citizens to sit at home and do this work rather than try and do everything on paper or go and visit an office. So, yes, I think it’s probably at the 25 percent success level at the minute. Rough figure, for government, but the direction of travel is to help people to get what they need quickly and therefore more cheaply for the government and for the individual.
Yourdon: I was actually referring to something—I think of it differently philosophically—which is instead of having the information essentially go top-down, turning it around and having it go bottom-up.
Miller: Ahh, yeah, so the social networking-type of environment.
Yourdon: Yes. For example, in New York City we never did, as citizens, trust the official government information about whether the public transportation was running on time. If you went to the train station, could you catch a train on time? And now we rely on citizens, who contribute the information themselves into a social network. And there are more and more attempts to provide mechanisms for citizens to either input information or actually contribute services that would otherwise be provided in a top-down fashion.
Miller: Well, I think there are two ways citizens can influence their services. One is through using them. The information they provide is then collected based on the way they use them and will modify the way governments react with them, but the bigger one, I think, is the citizen voice.
Yourdon: Yes.
Miller: I think in the UK we are still very unsure as to how to use this citizens’ voice. We have had some experiments in the UK. We have a representational democracy, which means that in the UK, if you elect somebody, you elect them to make the decisions for you. So they sit in Parliament to use their judgment to engage in the debate about what are the right laws, what is the right government and for the people.
Yourdon: Mm-hmm.
Miller: There is this wave of opinion, people’s opinions, what in the UK we might call the “X-factor” type of opinion from people that comes through the electronic media. This is now providing information to those elected representatives in a fairly prolific way. And the problem that those elected representatives have is to first understand if that electronic voice is representative? How can it be made to be representative? And, secondly, how to hear all those individual comments? How do you possibly pay attention to the volume of electronic comments that are coming from the population, to help them to understand what the public view is.
In Parliament, we have some experiments in some of our committees, which are about inviting comments on bills, on committees’ scrutiny of bills. And as the process goes through Parliament, those are difficult to manage because it’s difficult to understand if what you get is the true public voice or the lobby public voice or just the electronic-enabled public voice.
Yourdon: Yes.
Miller: So there is an experiment, but not yet a great deal of understanding of how that should and can influence the members when they make decisions. It’s the same in government where Number 10—that’s the prime minister’s office—has been very engaged in trying to connect to the public. They’ve had a petitions website to try to gauge what issues the public are focused on, what are their priorities? But, again, it’s very difficult to know from the petitions they’ve had, the experiences they’ve had, what is of value, what is representative, what is lobbying, what is irrelevant to government because they can’t do anything about it? It’s quite difficult to be able to receive the information and do something with it.
And I think this “Government 2” thing is less about how you enable the comments, although there’s something about making that representational, it’s what do you do with what you get? How do you process it? How do you manage it? I don’t think there’s an answer to that yet.
Yourdon: But does your office get involved in these ongoing experiments?
Miller: In as much as members require there to be experiments, and therefore to be able to facilitate public comments into some of the scrutiny going on in Parliament, or some of the legislative activity going on in Parliament, yes. But this has to be a member-led activity because they are the elected representatives. They have to understand what the options are, but then they have to know what to do with the options. And we can’t tell them.
Yourdon: Well, I think that’s the classic example you were talking about before, the relationship between the business community, in this case, members of Parliament, and the technology people. Now, that is interesting.
Miller: We’re very much in a facilitative role in that.
Yourdon: Yes.
Miller: Parliament is 700 years old and it’s lived on petitions, paper petitions, and the public being able to access Parliament for 700 years, or perhaps it was probably for the higher class originally, but nowadays, Parliament’s main function is to be open to the public. “Electronically open” means something different.
Yourdon: Yes.
Miller: And we haven’t got our heads around yet what that means and how to deal with that.
Yourdon: That’s a very good point. And I suspect we’re going to be seeing a lot more about that in every dimension in the years ahead, especially with all the current news that we’re seeing about activity. One of the questions I had was whether IT in your case is expected to enable entirely new things which the business, whether it’s Parliament or other parts of government, simply cannot do today. Are you expected to bring completely new possibilities up for their consideration?
Miller: Yes.
Yourdon: Or just improve on what they’re now doing?
Miller: Well, I think it’s an interesting place to use technology, because we have an interesting customer group, very diverse. It ranges from people who don’t really like using computers or electronic mechanisms, to people who are probably world leaders in using electronic information.
Yourdon: Okay.
Miller: So one of the roles for IT in this organization, and our function in this organization is to be able to describe the possible, but also to be able to follow the impossible demands of those people right out at the front. So, for instance, we have had in the last few months debates in either chamber as to whether people can use iPads in the chamber.
Yourdon: [laughter] Ahh, okay.
Miller: Now in both chambers they have voted and said, “Yes, they can.” That doesn’t sound like a great big thing, does it? Because initially what that means is that Members in either house will have their papers electronically, which is good because it saves printing, it’s environmentally efficient, it’s timely—there are lots of very good things about it. The impact behind that, the opportunity behind that is to be able to provide the Member in his chamber with more information, instantly, than they’ve ever had in the past.
Yourdon: Mm-hmm.
Miller: That changes the way the debate happens. It allows Members in the chamber, if they wish, to be able to see what the public is saying about the debate as it’s happening.
Yourdon: That’s right.
Miller: If they wish. In fact, there was an experiment in the House of Lords where they did a parallel debate. So they did a debate in the chamber, and there was a parallel debate that was open to the public to engage.
Yourdon: Ahh.
Miller: The public didn’t engage very much, but, you know, it was a one-off first try. But how does that change democracy and the democratic process? Obviously, if you take it to the extreme, it will change the way democracy works. It will change the way the democratically elected Member is fed information. It changes a tradition. If you just have it as a source of your paper, it won’t change very much at all.
Yourdon: Right.
Miller: And our job is to display the opportunities for Members to decide at what pace they want to move.
Yourdon: Okay. That’s very interesting. Of course, iPads are a good example of another whole area that I wanted to ask about, which is the new trends that you see helping to shape the future. Almost everyone I’ve spoken to has focused on mobile technology in one form or another. Is that near the top of your list in terms of new technologies?
Miller: Absolutely, totally. It’s mobile individual.
Yourdon: Yes.
Miller: It’s not just “mobile,” but it’s “individual.” “I want to use the technology I want to use; please IT organization, don’t lock me down.”
Yourdon: Aha, okay.
Miller: That’s specifically true because our customer group is not a homogeneous group of people. They are people of independence, who can and do make their own choices about what technology they use, what software they use, and how and when they use it.
Yourdon: Okay.
Miller: So our preoccupation at the minute is with a new ICT strategy. Being as old as I am, I can see some trends appearing in IT, and I can go back to the days of the mainframe in the 1980s, when IT told everybody, “This is what you get, and you get it for five hours a day or one hour a day, and we’ll crunch numbers for you.”
Yourdon: Yes.
Miller: And then about the mid-, early ’90s, it was about e-mail and messages. Electronic communication replaced letters. I’m quite surprised when I get a letter these days.
Yourdon: [laughter]
Miller: That was sort of the 1990 to 1995 invention of IT. At the same time, we took IT out of the mainframe environment. It became the business owners’ product, and they had their own systems, and they set up IT departments, one of which I managed. And they created small, discrete, beautifully formed IT for very specific purpose.
You get into the late 1990s, and people want to join up this small, discrete information, so you centralize IT again, and you become enterprise IT, and that brings back control. It brings back format; it brings back locked-down information that says, “You work this way because you have to because we can’t keep it all safe and we can’t predictably manage the information flows unless you do.” I think what we’re seeing in the late 2000s is a move away from that integrated, hard integration of IT into individual IT.
Yourdon: Ahh.
Miller: People at work want what they get at home. And what they get at home is massive. They can use any product they like to do e-mail by signing up for free. No controls that they are aware of stops them from accessing that from any device anywhere. There is software that they can download anywhere to do what they want to do. And if they can do that at home, why not at work? I think that our ICT strategy here is to try to preserve security around data and to open up the opportunity for people to individually use that data, in whatever software, whatever hardware they want to use.
Yourdon: Okay.
Miller: And that’s our challenge: how do we make that happen and keep the data secure? Because the data is about confidence, trust, security, interoperability. So that’s our challenge and our strategy over the next five years. For instance, we currently provide a big e-mail service. It’s secure. It has network perimeters, security. We barbwire on it. And it means that if you travel out of the Estate, you have a heck of a problem dialing into the network because of all of the security we have.
Yourdon: Right.
Miller: So our question is, where can we put that e-mail service to allow people to get it easily on the move where individually it’s secured to them? Can we use Microsoft’s cloud service or Google’s cloud service? Would it be secure enough for our Members’ requirements? Can we do that for the administration? Those are our big questions. Those are the questions we have to ask, and when we look at “can we put it into the cloud?” we’re asking, “Is it secure? Can other people crack it? Is it safe? Has it got sovereignty if you put it into a U.S. company’s servers?”
Yourdon: [laughter]
Miller: Would the U.S. government be able to demand they could see it? You can imagine, for a UK Parliament, that’s an absolute veto.
Yourdon: Oh yes, yes.
Miller: Can we transfer it? If we buy a Microsoft service, can we ever go out of it again?
Yourdon: Actually, a more fundamental question is, do you know where it is? You know, before you ask whether the U.S. can get it, you have to know where it is, that the data is in the U.S. or on some island in the Pacific Ocean.
Miller: Yes, that’s exactly the sovereignty issue. So we have big questions about this very attractive offering because it looks like a good cost break if we can move into these big-scale services, these utility services. Can we afford the risk of these other issues, which are security, sovereignty, and transferability?
Yourdon: Is there a fundamental feeling in your world that these problems will eventually be solved?
Miller: Yes.
Yourdon: That it’s just a matter of time?
Miller: We think they can be solved. We think they can be solved in the next 12 months. We are actively investigating how to solve them. Our role in IT is to look at our customer group and say, “Actually, what you want is that kind of flexibility. Do we provide it ourselves, or do we provide it cheaper from somewhere that already does it?”
Yourdon: Mm-hmm.
Miller: If we did that, how do we solve these other problems? So our active work is to solve these problems. If, after six months, we say, “We can’t solve these problems,” then we have to hold until they will be solved. But they will be solved.
Yourdon: Yeah. I certainly find general agreement that this whole cloud model of having an infinitely scalable resource is one that is inevitable—it’s a tidal wave.
Miller: Mm-hmm.
Yourdon: It’s just a question of whether it’s this year or next year or the year after. You know, there’s another kind of new trend that a few people have mentioned, and I’m curious to see if it’s relevant for you. There’s an author in the United States by the name of Clay Shirky who refers to this as the “cognitive surplus.” He argues that ours is the first generation now, maybe the generation that’s coming out of college, that has the time and interest and computer resources to contribute some part of their surplus brainpower, so to speak, to free things like Wikipedia and thousands of things like that—and that things like this have never happened before in society. Is that sort of concept one that is relevant in your work?
Miller: I think knowledge is a key issue. And I think people like to be engaged in knowledge. I think there are two problems for us and the work that we do. One is about authoritative knowledge. How can we be sure that the collective knowledge has authority? The Wikipedia issue.
Yourdon: You’re aware of the comparisons with Encyclopedia Britannica?
Miller: I was just going to mention it. There’s a one percent maybe variation in the authority and accuracy.
Yourdon: Yeah, and the most amazing is the mean time to repair.
Miller: And look at the administration behind Wikipedia that makes it work that way. Look at the increased controls on Wikipedia.
Yourdon: That’s true, that’s true.
Miller: Now why did that happen? And that’s my second point, information goes out-of-date very quickly. It also needs managing.
Yourdon: Yes.
Miller: And I think that the key for us is to understand whether unmanaged sources of data can sustain themselves over the long period. Or will it need increased management? Now Wikipedia has chosen to put in that increased management in order to keep up its authority level.
Yourdon: Yes, that’s true. That’s true.
Miller: So my question back is, is that a necessary step?
Yourdon: Ahh. I certainly don’t know. [laughter]
Miller: I don’t know either. And it’s the same question if you like which our Members face when they try to listen to the electorate voice.
Yourdon: That’s a good point.
Miller: How can you judge the validity of what you’re hearing? How can you deal with the volume of what you’re hearing? These are two important questions I think the world has to concentrate on, but there will be an answer. I just don’t know what it is yet.
Yourdon: Meanwhile, there’s also the economic aspect to this. This whole concept of essentially free software, databases, open source, you know, all of that stuff, has completely transformed the economics of large parts of Africa and other countries. I certainly think that that may be significant—and the CIO of Google thinks that this is going to be transformative in our time.
Miller: It absolutely is transformative, and it’s about making software a utility that people engage with and engage on.
Yourdon: Yes. That’s true.
Miller: I think it is, I can see the point. I just don’t know what the sustainable model is. If I seriously look at investing in a Google model for our users, what do I then do about sustainability and growth and future-proofing? What happens in the now if it’s free?
Yourdon: Good question, yeah.
Miller: I don’t know, you see? And I think the job of CIOs is to be able to read the market a little bit further forward, and be able to explain it to our customers, so they don’t fall off a cliff by trying something too brave.
Yourdon: And too early.
Miller: Or too early. Well, I’m not sure about too early. To me, the Google model is just so attractive. I don’t think that it will fail. But what if it did, and we’d invested all our knowledge in that?
Yourdon: Good point.
Miller: On the other hand—there is another hand. We could invest in the very well-known Microsoft and find that we’re locked in and have no options. And can’t take a future anywhere else. So our job is to make both possible for the future, because there is no answer yet. That’s why transferability is the key.
Yourdon: Interesting.
Miller: That we don’t get locked in. We own our own data, and we can move it to whatever service is best at the time.
Yourdon: There’s another broad area that I want to make sure we have a few minutes to talk about, and that is the opposite side of what we’ve been discussing so far, the dark side of the force. What are the risks and problems and so forth that keep you awake at night?
Miller: [laughing] Interesting place to work here. You see, I don’t get kept awake by the future of technology. I think if we proceed with ambitious caution, we’ll find a solution. I don’t think it’s a difficult impossibility to proceed at a pace that allows you to change track if necessary, as long as you understand that’s what you may need to do.
I think the things that keep me awake at night are the more immediate, what’s happening now. And that’s about the instant services required here. So when we are working on the electronic services that support the work of the House, there is no time adjustment allowed for failure. They have to work the moment that it’s done.
Yourdon: Ahh.
Miller: So immediacy is the thing that is critical because IT is never fully, 100 percent going to work 100 percent of the time. But it has to. So that’s a critical business imperative. You know, if you create an agenda for the House business, it has to be available at the time, to the minute, when it has to be available. It has to be available so many hours before it’s used in the chamber. Information has to be updated immediately and online within two hours of what they said each day.
Yourdon: Hmm.
Miller: So, you know, you have these time-critical issues. Big-scale text issues are a little bit worrying, I guess, because the technology’s so irritating. The thing that worked yesterday fails to work today. Why is that?
[both laughing]
Miller: So that’s the irritation factor. And the other things that probably keep me awake are very much more to do with the user. How to keep the communication, how to keep the information flows at the right level, in that right language, that people get it. They get the opportunity, they’re not afraid of it, because they trust the solution without it all being proved to them, and not being proved to them in technical language but in language that they understand. How to get that trust, that relationship between IT and the users and how to maintain it?
Yourdon: Interesting.
Miller: That’s the key issue. And that is really about hearing, living, breathing the experiences of the user, and showing that you’re doing it all the time.
Yourdon: And that leads very naturally to my next question then, which is about the generational changes, because how you live it and breathe it and so forth with an older user may or may not be the same as how you would go about doing it with somebody fresh out of the university. Have you seen fundamental changes in the generation of people not even out of the university these days, they could be teenagers?
Miller: No, it’s fascinating. When I joined Parliament in 2005, one Member would not have any computers in his constituency office.
Yourdon: Is that right? My goodness.
Miller: Would not have it. He unfortunately died soon after I joined here. Now every Member, whether enthusiastically or reluctantly, has IT and is dependent on IT. And when I look at the user surveys, Member surveys that we’ve just done, one of their top needs, across all the services they’re given, is IT.
Yourdon: Hmm.
Miller: That’s the top key issue for them, so something has significantly changed. In 2010 we had an election, and a third of the House changed. So what I have noticed is, amongst the new Members, a much higher proportion of people who are self-sufficient in IT and ambitious to use IT. The other thing I’ve noticed, interestingly, is a move away from using the IT that they’re just given. A small number, but still a growing percentage, and they’re using their own products, mostly Apple. A big change for us.
Yourdon: Interesting.
Miller: From our products to Apple products. So whereas in the last Parliament we had maybe 20 members who were devoted Mac users, we now maybe have 80, maybe more. And with the growth of the iPad, first on the market as that device, without a real competitor yet, it may be twice that number.
Yourdon: I just got my iPad 2 the day before I took the plane over here.
Miller: Ahh, well done! And not very widely available in the UK yet. But we have a queue of people who are waiting for it. We’re in fact running a trial with two committees, one in the Commons, one in the Lords, where the members of those committees who have very wide-ranging experience with IT will use these iPads for their committee papers.
Yourdon: Ahh, interesting.
Miller: And they’ll take them away and use them however they use them privately, probably e-mail, Word documents, and so forth, but use them in their committee. And of the two committees, which are about 16 members each, one Member on each committee has said no, for different reasons. But only one has said no. The rest are all engaged and saying, “Yes, we see the point. We’ll give it a go. We’re not all confident, but we’ll give it a go.”
Yourdon: Interesting.
Miller: To find out what it’s like to use that kind of electronic device, to use their imaginations to tell us what’s next. And I think that would not have happened in the last Parliament. The change is very fast.
Miller: Very significant, led by consumer products that people like. I mean, a little quote for you—this will delight Apple—I gave somebody their iPad, got a little message back a couple of days later: “I think I’m in love!” It’s what I call “forgiving technology.” It’s like the iPhone, you know, it’s forgiving technology.
Yourdon: Yes.
Miller: It may even be like the BlackBerry, which is awkward technology. But forgiving technology because people can get their signal.
Yourdon: Yes.
Miller: There are other products that we have provided that are technically superior, but unforgiving, because if they go wrong, they’re too complex. They go wrong because they’re too complex, a lot of user error. And then people do not forgive them. So I think forgiving technology and the adoption of it is a big change I’ve seen.
Yourdon: Interesting.
Miller: It makes people more interested in it, more able to experiment. The iPad is representing everything. We’ve had tablets. They didn’t do it.
Yourdon: No?
Miller: They didn’t do it because they’re too complex. They would take too much time. We’ve had Berry Lites and laptops.
Yourdon: Mm-hmm, netbooks.
Miller: But it creates a barrier between me and the person I’m talking to, and in our debating chamber, it doesn’t work. So the flat divide that is forgiven when it goes wrong has made a huge user turnaround.
Miller: So we have been issuing iPads for probably six months, which is quite advanced for organizations, but I watch users and how they use their IT. That’s what the CIO has to do.
Yourdon: I agree.
Miller: Watch, listen, learn, reflect.
Yourdon: I think you’ve summed it up. Now, I have one minute left, so the final question, and I think it’s an appropriate final question, is, so where do you see your own future? Where do you go from here?
Miller: [laughter] That’s such a difficult question for me, because I’ve never planned a career.
Yourdon: I’m astounded at how often I’ve gotten that answer. Maybe there’s some deep truth to that.
Miller: Well, I think, well, the deep truth as far as I’m concerned is I’m fascinated about what I can change. What can I do that has an impact that changes stuff and makes it better? So if I’m interested about what I can change; it’s what I can see that I can do that I do next, and mostly that’s just been accidental for me. So I haven’t ever planned it. So I’m not planning the next phase.
Yourdon: Fair enough. All right, well, thank you.