Home Office CIO on taming tech and why ID cards are good news

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...

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