Mr. Barry Lowry:

I am not fully aware of how the Department of justice procured this but I can tell her about how the OGCIO uses the SBIR. The SBIR was developed by Enterprise Ireland and is very much a predecessor of the some of the govtech stuff we are looking at now. The idea was about identifying a requirement of the needs better met by start-ups or very small companies that have a passion in this area. If I remember rightly, we were looking at how we could develop a chatbot for gov.ie that met the needs of the most vulnerable. This was the actual expertise of the company we got involved in. How it ended up in the Department of justice could have been through a partnership with another company that had a contract with the Department. I am not sure about the details. I would rather it explained that.

In some respects, that story is exactly why we are doing govtech. One of the weaknesses of the SBIR process was that once the pilot was finished, it had to stop and go to procurement. What the EU innovative procurement partnership allows us to do is invest quite substantial amounts of money in that company to build something that can be worked and used in real services. It gives a lot more mentoring and investment to the company and makes it very viable for it to continue to invest in the product. That is the desire in that type of relationship but I cannot explain to the Senator the detail of that particular one. I am not sufficiently aware of it.