By Nick Heath, 10 July 2009 10:48
INTERVIEW
The Home Office CIO speaks to silicon.com's Nick Heath on ID cards, protecting data, and how tech can make a difference
Home Office CIO Annette Vernon is steeling herself for a challenge that will require steady nerves and painstaking precision to avoid getting burned.
As an amateur glass maker she is preparing to blow her first piece of glass, a complex process where the blower grasps a sheet of molten glass between two sheets of wet newspaper.
"It's terrifying to watch they're holding the molten glass and they've only got two minutes to do it," she told silicon.com.
But Vernon could just as easily be describing her role in trying to modernise and consolidate an IT estate spanning 26,000 staff spread across the Home Office's myriad departments and agencies.
"I try not to think of my job as tin and wires because to me my job is about information," she said.
"Information is the lifeblood of the Home Office. It flows around it, you have to protect and guard it very carefully but you also have to share it, because sharing it also helps to protect the public, such as information on people coming in and out of the country and giving police information to help fight crime."
Vernon is aiming to get the Home Office's lifeblood flowing by replacing the rats' nest of incompatible systems that have grown up within the department over the decades.
"I am looking at how we can put in one common infrastructure across the whole of the Home Office... I'm starting on the bottom three layers which are the networks, the desktop and the corporate applications.
"In terms of the information that we use, we also need to get to keeping one version of the truth but that would be Nirvana," she said.
The biggest projects
The Home Office's role in safeguarding national security means Vernon has oversight of the most high profile and controversial IT projects in the UK, ranging from organising IT security at the London 2012 Olympic Games to the Impact programme to consolidate the fragmented and ageing police computer systems in England and Wales to the Interception Modernisation programme to allow the security services to monitor online communications and web traffic, and the government's £4.7bn ID cards project.
Despite a recent spate of criticisms, from Tories pledging to cancel the scheme if they win the next election to concern over the failure to provide readers for the microchip on ID cards issued to foreign nationals, Vernon is convinced of the need for the cards.
"What we are trying to do by having biometrics is have something that is...
Comments
There are 8 comments. Join the discussion
1. Guy Herbert
Cobalt programmer? Do you mean COBOL programmer? That would be plausible in the DWP 20 years ago. I don't think Cobalt would be, being rather fancy and modern.
2. karen challinor
she may be convinced of the need for the ID card and NIR scheme and indeed goes on at length about how the biometrics will provide an extra layer of security for the card
without once providing a single reason to convince anyone else why we actually need the scheme in the first place
so, please, if you are so convinced of the need for the card and the NIR, show us the evidence that convinced you so that we may also become similarly convinced or present a counterargument
3. Ian Farrell
Can we deal with the issues and arguments about why we need cards in the first place and how they are going to make our lives better or safer.
And perhaps it might be nice to know how soon we can expect working clones of these cards to be available to the people we want to protect ourselves from.
I suspect this project to continue to be a monumental waste of taxpayers money and articles like this only serve to confirm that opinion.
4. Richard
Perhaps she worked with COBOL rather than Cobalt?
Perhaps these rosy views about the benefits of the Home Office & its ever more intrusive, ever more expensive IT projects also need correcting?
5. Terry Cee
Yeah, got to agree.
This is a techies' view - just because we can doesn't mean we should . . . . and it doesn't address half the issues already aired ad-nauseum.
Nice go at changing the direction of spin, though! She could try out in the nets in Cardiff.
6. Doomsayer
So the Home Secretary was jumping the gun when he said that ID cards would never be compulsory & appeared to be paving the way for dropping the whole project. None of that sorry crew can even sort out the truth from the spin - how do they expect to manage to get this project off the ground.
7. anonymous
I am living in Italy at present and have a (paper only!) Italian ID card.
Each time I move house, I have to go to the local comune (council) if I want to update my legal address.
No-one has mentioned this feature of ID cards in the UK, but I don't see any way of avoiding it. So the ongoing costs of the ID card scheme involve a lot of extra costs above the issuing of cards. What will happen to someone who sells up in the UK and moves abroad, do we have two ID cards, or none. At present I live in four different EU countries and have had two ID cards at the same time on many occasions. You always end up needing the card (eg in Italy to buy a car).
Can't wait to see what a mess the systems will get into.
PS I have a healthcard in Italy and in France, the two systems are both going IT and will collaborate. The UK of course has.....
8. Chris Goodman
The billions wasted on the planned ID card that is to become history next year could have saved lives if spent on troop lift helicopters. It would also have freed up a whole heap of civil servants who could have enlisted to make up the army's manpower shortfall.