Mr. Seamus McCarthy:

Certainly the issue is a very serious one in areas like the health sector, defence spending and anywhere where there is specialised equipment. The important point is that when one decides to use a particular system, one must look at it on a whole-of-life basis. When one is originally selecting somebody to build a system or to customise it, one must take into account that it will be used for ten years. One should be factoring into the evaluation and the business case for it the fact that it is going to be used for ten years, that one will be paying maintenance costs, an annual licence fee and so on. One can approach the value for money issue at the beginning but what very often happens is that at the end of ten years, one continues to use the system and so every year one needs to be thinking about whether now is the time to look again and move to a new system. Technologies move on and so on. It is certainly something that is worth thinking about. A serious mistake could be made where, for example, one looks at a three-year contract for something, the maintenance costs then become exorbitant but one is locked into the system and one has to incur a fairly major capital expense to change it. Taking a long-term perspective on something like a technology system is certainly necessary.