Why the National Gallery isn't following the tech herd

Technology has its temptations: it's difficult not to be seduced by the latest, brightest piece of kit and the appeal of putting it in the hands of every member of staff. But for some CIOs, choosing when not to install technology can be just as important to the health of a business as choosing when to roll it out wholesale.

At the National Gallery, head of IS Len Nunn knows that the injudicious use of technology can put off the museum's visitors.

"We tend not to try and mix paintings and technology too much. Our view is that if someone is there to look at a painting, they should be able to concentrate on the painting without the distractions that technology might maybe bring," Nunn told silicon.com.

As a result, there's no plans to put in wi-fi coverage, either for users or visitors.

But the museum is planning to update some parts of its public-facing tech: its website is due for a revamp with a new display, more information on the gallery's catalogue and art history added, as well as better integration with internal systems.

"The website display is the tip of the iceberg - we're trying to embed content management into day-to-day operations and, where there's information to feed from internal management systems, we're trying to make those connections automatically. One of the issues with our current system is that it's quite labour intensive to keep up to date and so the challenge isn't just implementing a new website, it's getting the connectivity, making it efficient, effective and well-designed, and hopefully, cut out all labour intensive bits," he said.

"Internally, it takes a lot of effort to change from one major system to another, especially with what we're trying to do - to better integrate the new system. There's a lot of activity under the hood, but from a public point of view, what we're doing is bringing in more enabling technologies and keeping the website new and fresh and alive," Nunn said.

Storage too is also ready for a revamp as the National Gallery runs of space to keep its data, and the plan is for a system that will help users establish the priority of information - keeping the most important information for posterity and compliance purposes, and disregarding the data equivalent of white noise.

With a server room move scheduled for later this year, the gallery is equally going against the tech trend that sees any server maintenance followed by a shift to virtualisation.

"What we don't really intend to do is change the kit or the applications we're using - it really is just a physical location change… we've not used virtualisation up until now because we try and eke what we can out of the hardware we've got through extended warranties and that sort of thing.

"You still have to buy the software licences - for example, if you have multiple virtual SQL server installations, you still have to buy multiple SQL server licences. Really, the costs only are in hardware. With the relatively small number of staff - we have about 500 staff in here - we don't actually have a huge hardware inventory to maintain, we're quite traditional in the way we've got our servers organised."

So what would Nunn do should his procurement fairy godmother grant him an unlimited budget? Surprisingly, a shopping spree is not top of his list.

"Using the latest technology doesn't always relate well with some of the people who maybe have been here a very long time, before computers were in general use. Many staff are used to doing things in a certain way for good reasons and we must make sure that any change is actually for the better.

"The culture can be different across the gallery, and, to be realistic, just buying more technology would be counterproductive. I would do more of the same if we had more money: put in more network resilience, more resilience for external connections - all fairly boring and basic stuff. Having said that, we have very strong dependence on technology here and it is critical that we keep what we have running."