Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Wednesday, 11 June 2025
Joint Oireachtas Committee on Arts, Media, Communications, Culture and Sport
Arts Council Grant Management IT System: Discussion
2:00 am
Mr. Polycarp Anyanwu:
What we did in the first two years was to enhance the platform that it had been running on. We are going to now take it to the cloud. What I have sourced to do is, if we run into a very big hitch or maybe it is hard or there is a problem, we can restore it in a different location and continue to process. We have enhanced the reliability. However, the vulnerabilities and all the issues around security and clunkiness, and it being not user-friendly, are all there. That is what we are seeking to address by getting a commercial off-the-shelf grant management system. A commercial off-the-shelf grant management system, from my own estimation and the experience of other public bodies that have implemented them in Ireland, will not take us multiple years to implement. After six months or, say nine months, we are going to start doing a pilot run of a commercial off-the-shelf grant management system. When we evaluated that, we thought that is a better use of public money instead of continuing to try to remedy the existing situation.
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