Director of Parliamentary ICT Joan Miller set to retire

Miller has been working at PICT for nearly nine years

Joan Miller, the director of Parliamentary ICT (PICT), is set to retire later this year.

PICT provides the IT and associated services to 650 MPs and 763 members of the House of Lords, and supports the activity of some 7,000 employees in Parliament.

Miller has spent nine years in her role at PICT, following a two-year stint as head of e-government and ICT at the London Borough of Lambeth, and eight years as head of ICT at Suffolk County Council.

In a statement Miller said: "It has been a great privilege to work in Parliament and to be supported by such a fantastic team and I am very proud that during my time we have created a really professional, hard-working and innovative ICT department in PICT."

In a recent interview with Computing, Miller explained that in 2009, her team had to come up with a new five-year plan for PICT that would develop Parliament's IT through to the general election in 2015 - when another plan would be put in place.

Miller has overseen a shift in Parliament's mobility strategy, with the adoption of a paperless pilot project that saw members using iPads instead of paper to complete work. PICT is also moving more services to the cloud, and is working on creating a data warehouse of Parliamentary "business" data.

"It's what we call internally ‘data.parliament'.... we are in the throes of creating an external platform that will enable anyone who can use the internet to access our data, search it, re-purpose it and do whatever they like with it," she told Computing.

PICT is soon to be replaced by a new Digital Office in order to bring together all online and ICT services into a single organisation. The two relevant management boards said that they would appoint a CTO who will report to a head of digital, who will run the new organisation.