Mr. John Barry:

I appreciate that €44 million is quite a sum. For that spend, in terms of IBM, we are getting a customer care and billing system that will have to have the capacity to deliver several million bills, a work and asset management system which, when we start to record data on the network, will be data hungry. By that I mean that when we start to make investment decisions, based on information coming back into our work and asset management system, it is vital that the system has the capacity to record that data and that we extract them to make sensible investment decisions. The system will handle an enormous amount of data on an annual basis. The third area is back office systems, audit financial systems. Obviously, we have to carry out procurement exercises and pay our suppliers. That is the third part of the plank.

We have delivered probably eight major stems in the past 12 months. If one compares what we have received for the €44 million with has happened in other jurisdictions where companies such as Thames Water invested £100 million in an asset management system alone, the relevancy of the cost involved comes into perspective. What do we get for the money? When companies such as IBM come, we sit down and define with them the business requirements and write business processes around these requirements. To date, we have probably written about 1,300 or 1,400 business processes. They then configure the systems which come out of the box, so to speak, and are standard, but we can fit them to suit our particular business requirements. We test them and, obviously, before we go live, they have to be working end to end. An enormous amount of work goes into this task. When we go live, there is an element of post-live support. We are in that mode with a large portion of our system which went live on 1 January. In setting up this utility we cannot achieve what we want to achieve without the systems being in place, including systems to manage information and the data flowing around them. For what we are getting, the €44 million compares well with what has been spent in other jurisdictions. We now have systems and processes in place that will enable it to be a high-performing utility into the future.