Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

My Department receives significant volumes of correspondence. All correspondence received is acknowledged and most correspondence receives a further substantive reply. Depending on the nature of a particular item of correspondence, it may be brought to my attention or to the attention of staff within my Department.

Oftentimes, correspondence which is initially received by my Department necessitates collaboration with another Department.

In many cases this can take the form of a request for its observations on a draft reply or, in some instances, my Department provides information to another Department to facilitate it in formulating an appropriate response within a reasonable timeframe.

A full record of the journey that a particular item of correspondence travels is maintained and all responses are stored in an electronic system, which includes detailed search capabilities for retrieval of correspondence at a later point.

To achieve this, my Department uses a system known as eCorrespondence, an application offered under the "build to share" work programme of the public service ICT strategy.

My Department worked closely with the Office of the Government Chief Information Officer, OGCIO, as part of a project team to agree a common set of user requirements upon which the eCorrespondence system was designed.

The objective of the project team was to provide a solution which encompassed the required functionalities associated with the receipt, acknowledgement, reply and tracking of all correspondence and to provide this in such a way that it could become a common solution across all Departments over time.

The eCorrespondence system has been operational in my Department since June 2017 and replaced a number of disparate systems which had been deployed prior to that date.

One learns something new every day.

See this speech in context