Ms Maureen Kennelly:

It was approached at the very start, back in 2019, and a person was appointed to be part of the stakeholder group. That person attended a preliminary meeting. Unfortunately, he attended no further meetings. A degree of correspondence went from the Arts Council to the OGCIO to see where that person was. Unfortunately, no responses were received. Further contact with the OGCIO was made in early 2022 when we had received sanction at PO level for an internal IT resource.

I asked the OGCIO to help us with shaping the job specification, which it did. It was in late 2023 that I appealed directly to the OGCIO. Unfortunately, because of the invisibility of the OGCIO throughout the project, I did not know until that time that, in fact, it would have been there to help. It is a more general failing that past projects with failures like this are not shared more widely across government.