Houses of Parliament members are increasingly using their smartphones and tablets as a work tool, the parliamentary head of ICT, Joan Miller, has claimed.
Speaking at the Cloud World Forum in London Olympia today, Miller said that about three-quarters of the Houses of Parliament members, user group and staff, said that they were "very mobile".
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"We've had to build apps that can work in a mobile environment so that [members] are not carrying stacks of paper around with them. We've used iPads in a big way because they were the first on the scene and we could create a security comfort zone with them but there are now a lot of other tablets we could look at," she stated.
Some of the 44 committees in the House of Commons are moving to only using electronic paper - to write notes onto documents and to create documents themselves. A quarter of the House of Lords' 20 committees have shown an interest in using electronic documents on iPads, and two have already done so, said Miller.
The head of parliamentary ICT went on to say that bring your own device (BYOD) schemes were inevitable in workplaces.
"Over the last 10 years we've restricted members to one device that we provide. Since the 2010 election, we allow employees to bring in their own smartphone, and our approach is to secure the data rather than the device," she said.
