Mr. Robert Watt:

If one considers the Government services that are provided throughout the country, there is a backbone and a very sophisticated network in place. More and more services are in the cloud which Mr. Lowry and his team support. They provide the service on behalf of the entire public service. The one development that always springs to mind is the "build to share" application, the application of the common e-platforms across the Civil Service. These are massive IT transformation projects. In the past - colleagues on this side of the table will certainly recall this - we could have had 50,000 to 60,000 parliamentary questions in a year. People used to run around carrying pink folders and changes to replies to parliamentary questions would have been made on the hard copy. For instance, the administrative officer would have written a draft reply which would have been changed by the assistant principal officer and then the principal officer. It would eventually have reached the Minister. It is now all done in an e-system, where changes can be tracked. It is done efficiently and quickly. Replies are emailed to the Minister's office and copied to me. That is one example where we use e-submissions and e-records systems. In effect, the amount of paper kept within Departments is collapsing as more and more things are being filed electronically, apart from legal documents, deeds and so forth. It will lead to significant improvement in retrieval costs. When there is an inquiry, an investigation or a review, when the retrieval of documents is always an issue and a challenge, particularly where there are manual systems, the process will be greatly facilitated when, by the end of next year, the vast majority of Departments have this e-records system. Mr. Lowry's team is involved in the roll-out of these big software and development changes.