Memorandum from Head of UK Public Sector,
InterSystems (November 2006)
1. Concerning the use of ICT for Members
of Parliament at the House of Commons (HoC), its use (as with
many organisations) is in a continuous state of development/expansion/improvement
and I have the following points to make both concerning the formal
discussion within the meeting and informally thereafter:
(i) Security Strategy—this needs to
be formally owned by the HoC or similar and never outsourced.
(ii) IT Strategy—this needs to be formally
owned by the HoC or similar and never outsourced.
(iii) Technology[en rule] many Government
projects fail because the technology used is itself legacy (ie
more than 20 years old) which cannot support modern requirements.
(iv) We are in the web era—so it is
vital to use modern web-era designed products and technologies.
(v) The data used across the HoC can be complex,
confidential and case-oriented and the HoC is a real-time business.
(vi) After the meeting, I discussed with
the Rt Hon Alun Michael MP an analogy for the use of ICT in the
HoC along these lines . . .
"MPs are similar to doctors who hold surgeries
in their local geographical area (constituencies) discussing sensitive
case-files with their patients (constituents) and also work at
the national organisation (HoC) on a larger canvas that improves
the health and well-being of the nation".
2. Carrying that analogy forward, InterSystems
can assist the HoC in a manner of ways:
(i) "Ensemble" integration technology
is used by civil servants in the UK to manage complex data in
real-time from a number of differing data-stores to give answers
to today's business problems. In Holland, it is used on a nationwide
message-broking hub project (addressing the security needs) and
delivered in only four months from award of contract.
(ii) "Caché" is the underlying
technology of choice (a post-relational database and rapid application
environment) for the majority of medical installations in America
and many of those of England—as well as the police forces
in Belgium as they replace the old legacy systems of relational
databases.
3. These technologies are modern and efficient
to install, run and maintain—and also change as the business
requirements develop over time: we put the customer in control.
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