| Summary
The Parliamentary Information and Communications Technology Department (PICT) was established in January 2006, bringing together ICT staff and other resources from across both Houses of Parliament into a unified organisation. Our focus in this Report is on those services provided for Members of the House of Commons and their staff. In the context of a significant undertone of dissatisfaction with these services, we want to ensure that processes are in place to enable Members' services to be delivered efficiently and to an agreed standard, and to manage Members' often divergent ICT preferences.
In this Report, we describe how ICT services are currently provided and outline the work undertaken by Members and others in the recent past to create the current system of provision (Part One); and we seek to identify best practice elsewhere and possible points of comparison with the way services are provided in Parliament (Part Two). We then look at how Members' emerging requirements can be plugged into PICT's strategic planning, and how PICT could make itself better aware of Members' evolving use of ICT, in part through a new forum for investigating possible improvements to the existing service (Part Three).
We then go on to tackle the issues of most direct concern to individual Members: the tension between providing consistent, stable services and meeting Members' varying requirements (Part Four); extending services in the constituency so that they are comparable with those on offer at Westminster (Part Five); providing professional and reliable customer service with clear escalation procedures (Part Six); and providing up-to-date, good-value ICT equipment to Members that meets their requirements in a timely way (Part Seven). Finally, we investigate new services from which Members would be likely to benefit, either in the very near future or in the slightly longer term (Part Eight).
PICT's first priority must be to optimise existing services, starting with stability issues and connection speed, especially in the constituency, and ensuring that future roll-outs of new equipment are seamless and well-managed. But there is a strong expectation that new services, including wireless networking, will also be provided very soon—and the speed of technological development demands it. At the same time communications between PICT and Members need to be significantly scaled up. Real ongoing consultation is required for PICT to understand and meet Members' needs and to measure demand for services. This will require dedicated PICT staff responsible for developing relationships with Members and their staff, and a separate Members' customer forum, also involving Members' staff, to help to develop strategies and service levels. We want to ensure that PICT has a better understanding of Members' expectations, and that Members have a correct sense of what PICT can and cannot do for them.
Members as well as PICT have responsibility for the ICT systems in their offices. We are sure that most Members would not welcome further limitations on their freedom to customise centrally provided equipment. However, Members' freedom to install unsupported applications locally makes PICT's task more costly and complicated than it would otherwise be. Until they can access the full range of Parliamentary ICT services securely over the Internet, Members will need to accept the existing restrictions on the equipment they can use and on how they can use it. In return, however, they have every right to expect a good standard of service.
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