Official Report: Minutes of Evidence

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): I welcome Paul Duffy, deputy secretary in the Department and oversees Integr8 and finance shared services; and Kirstie Murray, programme director. Thank you for having us, accommodating us and giving us this room, as well as for the tour earlier.

I invite you to make an opening statement, Paul. Kirstie, you may add anything that you want. I ask members to indicate if they wish to ask questions. I apologise in advance: I have to leave for a separate appointment in about 10 minutes, but I will leave you in the hands of the Deputy Chair.

Mr Paul Duffy (Department of Finance): Thank you, Chair and members. It is great to host the Committee today and set out the purpose, scale and governance of the Integr8 programme. As you will have heard, Integr8 is a complex, cross-government transformation that seeks to establish modern finance and HR services that are designed and governed to be delivered across the entire Civil Service. It is a significant public investment, and, from the outset, it has been treated and governed as such, with defined financial tolerances and independent assurance at key decision points. At the moment, the cost of the programme, which includes the design, build and implementation of Integr8, as well as the ongoing finance and HR services that will be delivered to all Departments until 2034, is estimated to be £294 million. It will deliver significant benefits in the effectiveness and efficiency of our finance and HR services, as well as delivering an estimated saving of £14 million per year once the service has stabilised and gone live.

Within its approved scope, Integr8 involves the end-to-end redesign of all the finance and HR processes operating across Departments, the establishment of a new operating model and new shared service function and the implementation of modern enterprise technology to provide timely, reliable insight to support financial management and workforce decision-making. As part of the transformation, the programme will also secure payroll services and bring HR case management and recruitment services, which are currently outsourced under the HR contract, back in-house. By redesigning how people, processes, data and technology are brought together, Integr8 provides a unique opportunity to improve the efficiency, effectiveness and reliability of our core corporate services, enhance the experience of staff and service users and strengthen the quality of the financial and workforce information that is available to all Departments. Given that those services impact on all civil servants, as well as suppliers and job applicants, the scale and importance of the change should not be underestimated.

Members will have seen today that the programme is being delivered in close collaboration with Departments, delivery partners and finance and HR professionals across the system. A user-centred design is a core principle, and, to date, over 200 staff from across Departments have been directly involved in shaping the new services. The programme has also engaged constructively with the trade union side. Arrangements are now in place to manage ongoing engagement through formal Whitley machinery as the programme moves into delivery.

With over 1,000 staff currently involved in delivering finance and HR services and almost 30,000 staff across the Civil Service and arm's-length bodies impacted by them, effective change management is critical to realising the benefits and achieving value for money from the investment. A comprehensive communications training support approach will accompany implementation, ensuring that staff are equipped to operate the new services and that the benefits of the programme are realised in practice.

The programme has developed a phased go-live sequence informed by lessons from other large enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementations. Our current plans envisage finance services being deployed in waves between April and August of next year, followed by new HR services in October 2027 and January 2028, with final implementation by February 2028. Progression through each stage will be subject to formal decisions, with clear evidence required that services are stable, secure and deliverable before we proceed.

The Committee will appreciate that the programme is being delivered in a challenging financial environment, with Departments facing competing priorities and constrained resources. Delivery is dependent on sustained engagement from Departments in the co-design, testing, training and transition, alongside Departments delivering their business-as-usual responsibilities. There have also been periods of funding uncertainty that have required the programme to reset and re-plan. While those challenges have impacted on pace, they have reinforced the importance of disciplined financial management, robust planning and transparent decision-making. Programmes of this nature are inherently complex and carry risk. Unforeseen issues can arise during the design, build, testing and implementation phases. The programme has actively sought to learn from similar programmes, engage external experts and strengthen its assurance arrangements.

Integr8 is a major programme of reform designed to modernise finance and HR services and to provide stronger, more reliable support to Departments in managing public money and the Civil Service workforce. The scale of change is significant, but it is being undertaken with clear accountability, strong governance, disciplined assurance and sustained engagement with staff and stakeholders. We welcome the Committee's scrutiny and will engage openly as the programme progresses.

Kirstie and I are here to take whatever questions that you, Chair, or members may have.

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): Thank you. Several members have indicated that they want to ask a question already. I will have to go in a minute, so I will get my spake in first.

It should be possible to say how much it costs. Is there a global cost for the delivery of the project? Have you formulated a number for how much it will save the Civil Service over a five- or 10-year timeline? I do not know whether it is possible to answer either of those questions.

Mr Duffy: The cost of implementing the programme is now estimated to be about £96 million.

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): Was that always the figure, or has it gone up?

Mr Duffy: It has changed as we have got clarity on costs. For example, one of the items for which we do not have full cost visibility is procurement for our payroll services. That is being procured at the moment. There is an ongoing tender evaluation that will allow us to have a better understanding of what payroll costs will be. You will appreciate that, over time, there will be a series of estimates. As we go through procurement, we can get a better indication of the cost.

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): That is not a gotcha, honestly. I do not have the numbers. Is the £96 million an increase on what it was?

Mr Duffy: I think that it was about £92 million or £93 million.

Ms Kirstie Murray (Department of Finance): At the business case stage, we anticipated £93 million.

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): OK. That is not huge; it is not unreasonable.

Ms Murray: No.

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): OK. Can you say that there will be a saving?

Mr Duffy: The outline business case (OBC) estimated that the savings per annum will be £14 million, once the system goes live and stabilises. We will be able to refine those figures. As you might have seen earlier, we are starting to design how the processes will work, who will use them and what level of automation there will be. That will give us a better indication of the number of staff carrying out the processes and what the future staff levels will be for those processes.

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): You mentioned automation. It came up on our tour that there is some level of AI. Your able and, clearly, diligent team said that they were confident that you were being judicious about the amount of information being used to inform large numerical models (LNMs) or whatever AI is being used to create chatbots, which was the main function that they were talking about. I think that you were saying that the level of savings will, in part, depend on the level of automation: does that mean that you expect a headcount reduction on the basis of implementing that?

Mr Duffy: When it comes to automating processes, as you can imagine, a lot of our work at the moment on the finance and budgeting forecast side is done on spreadsheets, and there are people who have to manipulate and produce those spreadsheets. That will be on-system and, therefore, those people will no longer need to do those tasks and will be available to perform other roles.

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): It is a headcount reduction, but the people may be redeployed to other things.

Mr Duffy: Yes. I imagine that the AI capability in the Oracle solution will look different in two, three or four years' time. At the moment, however, it is largely based on the chatbot facility. That means that, if you wanted to know what annual leave you were entitled to, for example, instead of trying to find an annual leave policy, you would simply ask the chatbot and it would give you the information there and then.

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): Will it tell you, on a personal basis, what your annual leave is and not what a typical person at your grade in your Department is entitled to? Is it telling you specifically what your contracted leave is at that point?

Mr Duffy: It will be based on the policy that is in place at that time.

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): Will it be that intelligent that it will be talking to the individual and not just —?

Ms Murray: Yes, it absolutely should be. We all know that the power of AI lies in good data. There is a range of AI components that Oracle has built into its technology. Some of it, in the public-sector context, is more useful than others. Another good one that we have seen and that will be of benefit to staff has the ability to upload expenses. It will take a snapshot of your receipts, and the chatbot will say, "Is this is an expense?". It will ask you whether the line items there are right. If you say yes, it will ask you whether you want to send it to a line manager, and off it goes. That will replace the manual process of uploading an attachment and labelling it. It is about making the user journey easier. As we have said, some applications will be more helpful to our staff than others, but we will manage the roll-out of those carefully.

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): OK. I have one more question. In your note, you say that October 2026 is your hopeful "go live" date for some of the HR functions. I am sorry, it is not 2026; it is 2027. I am not trying to hold you to a year earlier than you promised. How much risk is there around that? Can you give me a percentage? We will not hold you to it.

Mr Duffy: If you are asking whether I am confident about the "go live" date next year for the finance and subsequently, I would say that I am about seven out of 10 at the moment.

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): OK.

Mr Duffy: We have to be realistic and say that we have not built the solution yet. We have not done our data cleansing and data migration. When you start to uncover things that may come out of that, that has an impact. Three or four years ago, when we were developing an outline business case, it would have been difficult to say that something will go live at a precise date four years in the future, when you have not procured it.

The Chairperson (Mr O'Toole): OK. That was when the October 2027 date was given. Again, this is not a gotcha; I am just trying to establish this. Roughly, what you are saying is that there is a 30% risk, give or take, that that date might slip: is that fair?

Mr Duffy: That is fair enough. That will change as we get closer to "go live".

The Deputy Chairperson (Ms Forsythe): Thank you both. It has been great today. The big thing for me is that, when looking at this, I had it very much in my head that it is just like an IT project, but, being down here and talking through it and talking to all the people, I realise that it is a wider project. It is the piece, the people and the processes and how they come out. I thank you for that, because it helped me to get a better understanding.

When a person logs in, they will have their own HR details and the system will link them to the app, to the work that they will be doing, which is really handy. That makes me think, however, that security will be more important than ever. Everything is on one system, and you have moved everything to being electronic. Will you have to spend a lot more on security than on previous systems to keep everybody's job specific and to control that and accesses to and crossovers between Departments? How easy would it be for there to be a blip? Whilst it looks handy, it makes me extremely nervous that you have one system. I could log in as an employee of each Department and have access to something confidential. What does the security look like, and will it be more sophisticated and expensive to operate and control?

Mr Duffy: The answer was set out as part of the demo. It is very much about role-based access and security. The Oracle solution is used worldwide; it is not unique to us. The security controls and measures are built into the solution. From the security perspective, we will be in a much stronger position than we are currently with two legacy systems that are 20 years old. Legacy systems are more exposed to cyber vulnerabilities. The enhancement of our security is an opportunity to have a more stable solution. Locking down access to data is a key component in the security measures that we take seriously as part of the design of the solution.

Ms Murray: At present, the management of security is manual. It is managed through a manual process to grant or remove someone's access to information depending on their role. In the role-based access that Paul described, individuals would see what they can only as part of their roles. The linkage with HR is a good thing, because you must be moved on the HR hierarchy to perform your new role. The control and access to, say, financial or other information is built into that one move, so it is not lots of extra work in the background that —.

The Deputy Chairperson (Ms Forsythe): Will that remain manual?

Ms Murray: It is manual at the minute.

The Deputy Chairperson (Ms Forsythe): For example, will it allow you to do something else to open up all those windows ? Will that aspect remain?

Ms Murray: No. That will be built into the system. As Paul said, that gives us a lot more control so that nothing will slip through the net.

Mr Duffy: At the moment, it is a manual process and somebody has to remember to do it, whereas, when we build it into the roles, when you move from role A to role B, that access is already built into the role, so nobody needs to intervene manually to do anything. It is a much more secure solution for access to data.

The Deputy Chairperson (Ms Forsythe): Cyberattacks on government systems are always an area of concern. You spoke about moving off the legacy contracts. They are two completely different contracts and systems. As you said, HR Connect is completely outsourced and operated by Fujitsu, and Account NI is inside and on more of a partnership basis. As you are moving to end those contracts, are you ending both completely, moving away from them and leaving them behind? Do you have all the intellectual property rights that come with that as you move forward?

Mr Duffy: We have two suppliers: Fujitsu and BT. BT supports the finance system; Fujitsu the HR system. When the system finally goes live in 2028, the contracts for both will have terminated, so there will be no further contract or arrangements with either of those parties. We will have a new contract in place with Oracle for the licensing agreement that we have with it for getting access to the solution that we have.

The key thing that we need to take from Account NI and the HR system is the data, and that is the process that we are going through now. We are extracting that data, analysing and cleansing it and will then migrate it across. On the HR Connect contract with Fujitsu, we are looking to see whether we can bring some of the stuff in-house sooner. We will probably need to extend that contract by a year, but we will extend it only for the absolute essentials. We are looking at bringing some of the recruitment and case-management work into the Civil Service next year and then only extend slightly for what is left for the likes of the payroll. That is work ongoing. The BT contract has already been negotiated and agreed up to a final point, and that will terminate when we go live.

The Deputy Chairperson (Ms Forsythe): So that is complete handover. You have the access and the rights to everything.

Mr Duffy: Yes.

The Deputy Chairperson (Ms Forsythe): That is good.

Perhaps you have already answered this question, but are you taking the learning from all those things? Both systems have a lot of issues and clunks in them. People often try to get in touch with me about accessing Account NI, but, if data are not in a particular format, they sit in a pile somewhere. You then have to chase them up because the system has not matched them up in a simple way. Are you starting this system anew with a fresh idea? You are not picking up those old systems as the starting point. Are you correcting the things that were wrong with them and starting a new, better system?

Mr Duffy: We are completely redesigning from scratch in a sense. The biggest learning point from both Account NI and HR was the customisation. Those solutions were built in 2006, and it was normal to customise a solution to how you operated. In today's environment, it is much more the other way around. Pushing standardisation is really important because that drives the efficiencies as well.

The problem is that, when you heavily customise a system, you are heavily reliant on the supplier, so, every time you want to do something, tweak something or change a process, you have to go back to the supplier to rewrite that part of the solution. That will not be the case with the new system. The key lesson is to standardise as much as possible, as that minimises any changes required after going live. It makes for a much smoother transition.

In the past you would have built a big system that sat for 15 or 20 years, and then you went through another process. We will now have software essentially running the system that will continually be updated every quarter. Standardisation allows that process to be much easier because, if you have tweaked your system in some way, the new functionality that gets released has to be redesigned against the tweak that you have made, and the less you do of that, the better. That is probably one of the big lessons that we have learned.

The Deputy Chairperson (Ms Forsythe): Absolutely. It is a sign of the times, and it is where we need to be. We have come so far. I remember the move to Account NI as a junior member of staff in the Audit Office. To think that that was where we were 20 years ago. I had to go through hundreds and hundreds of invoices for March and April to see whether the system was finding year end properly. It seems crazy that those were our processes. It seems such a basic thing, but that was where we were when Account NI came in. You are so much further forward now, and it is a good time to take the opportunity.

Mr Duffy: That is another lesson to be learned from Account NI. The system was fit for purpose when it went live, but the mindset of continuous improvement and how you continue to move with technology was not there. Now, you buy a piece of software that automatically gets updated. That is really important. AI will move on hugely in the next two to four years. If you built a stand-alone system, you would have to reinvest, whereas now, updating will become readily available.

The Deputy Chairperson (Ms Forsythe): Absolutely.

I will bring other members in. Gerry?

Mr Carroll: Thank you, Paul. It is a significant investment of almost £300 million, as you said. How would you answer anybody asking, "Is that value for money?"?

Mr Duffy: The spend was approved through a business case that demonstrated that it is value for money. Had it not demonstrated value for money, we would never have got approval to proceed. When you look at it in comparison to similar programmes happening in other jurisdictions, whilst it is not always easy to do like for like, because you will find that in other jurisdictions and programmes, it is sometimes simply a technology swap-out. We have taken the opportunity to redesign all our processes, so it is transformation rather than just a technology implementation. However, if you looked at the cost of those other programmes, you will see that we are not a million miles away from what you would expect. Obviously, as part of the business case process, there has been a degree of benchmarking and comparing with others.

A similar programme is happening in Health. We are close to Health colleagues, and we are watching what they are doing and understanding their programme and the costs that they are incurring. We are also learning from each other. For example, if they have a conversation with Oracle about something, we join in those conversations so that the public sector gets the maximum benefit.

Mr Carroll: Has all the money — the almost £300 million — been secured?

Mr Duffy: We have an annual budget process. Unfortunately —.

Mr Carroll: It has to be paid off per year, more or less.

Mr Duffy: That brings challenges. If you do not have certainty, it makes it difficult to plan for the year ahead on multi-year programmes.

Mr Carroll: Presumably, all or the bulk of that money is being paid to Oracle.

Mr Duffy: It is a mixture. The Oracle bit is the Oracle licensing element. There is an upfront cost to buy the licence and an annual cost thereafter. There is the internal programme team cost and the cost of our delivery partner, Version 1, which is helping to design the system and will manage the service.

Mr Carroll: I have a couple of other questions on that. You said that Oracle is developing the new system in conjunction with you and your team who owns what during the process or towards the end of it? Are the system and the staff needed to operate it still owned by Oracle? How does that dynamic work?

Mr Duffy: We have purchased a licence to use a piece of software. It is a bit like your Microsoft licence: at the end of the licensing period, if you decide not to renew your licence, you will not have the application. We have procured a licence to use the Oracle solution for the next 10 years. Towards the end of that period, a decision will have to be taken whether to continue with Oracle or go to one of the other big providers.

Mr Carroll: Procuring a licence at £300 million sounds a lot to me, although I do not work in the sector. You will probably quote benchmarks and other alternatives to me.

Something came across my desk recently: open source alternatives. I do not claim to be an expert in that at all. They are programmes that are not owned by Microsoft or other bigger organisations. Is that a model that could be used?

My final question goes back to the Deputy Chair's point about data protection. Did the Department carry out a data protection impact assessment? I am concerned that all that important information and data will be in one place and could be accessed easily by somebody if they wanted.

Mr Duffy: I will ask Kirstie to come in on the data issue.

Ms Murray: Certainly. It may be worth clarifying the £300 million as well, Gerry. What we have covered in our outline business case is the cost of investing in delivering the change from the old system to the new one and the ongoing cost of the contracts that the programme needs to enter for the new world to work. The total cost is £300 million. The cost of the programme, meaning the changes that we have described, is £97 million, as Paul said. Of the remaining money, about £81 million is the Oracle contract spend; it is not the full £300 million. There is then the cost of the payroll service, the relationship with Version 1 and its managed service support to help us to maintain the system and keep it working for us and the service wrappers technology that we need. There is more in there than just the Oracle cost.

We have taken a lot of time to engage with our data colleagues. We did a data protection assessment and have engaged with Oracle to look at its approach to data management and to ensuring security for it. Our data is hosted in what is called the "government cage", which is, in essence, a smaller data centre that is accessed only by government customers like us who have the same data requirements. Everyone who goes into the data centre has high levels of clearance. We are taking a lot of care. On the data front, we have secured access to as safe an environment as we can get for the information, bearing in mind the fact that it all exists and is hosted somewhere at the minute.

With that relationship with Oracle, we benefit from all the work that it does to maintain all the security and all the continual patching. That load, to continue to keep on the front foot when it comes to the cyber space, will not be on us, Gerry. We benefit from the scale of resourcing that it can put on that front.

Mr Kingston: As the Deputy Chair has said, our visit today has demonstrated the value of coming out to visit the premises and talking to a range of staff and seeing a demonstration of the new system. It has definitely improved my understanding. I have still more to learn about it, but you can see the practicality of combining the HR and finance services in one system, and that will continue to evolve over time.

I have seen no mention of the transformation fund, unless I missed it. This is not supported by moneys from the transformation fund: is that right?

Mr Duffy: That is right. The programme began before the transformation fund, but it is being funded through the Executive's normal Budget process rather than through the transformation fund.

Mr Kingston: If my notes are correct, you said that it will generate £14 million per annum in savings and that the total cost is £294 million up to 2034, was it?

Mr Duffy: Yes.

Mr Kingston: You have said a bit about the breakdown of that. Do you think that it will actually produce more savings than that? How do you calculate those savings? Also, during the presentation, it was explained to us how this will provide more visibility about the workforce and its deployment. I do not want to put words in your mouth, but does it improve the opportunities to move staff between Departments? A criticism that is often made of the Civil Service is that it is siloed, with people tending to stay in one Department for their career. Will it increase the opportunities to move staff in the short term or in the longer term?

Mr Duffy: In the outline business case in 2023, we estimated that the savings would be £14 million per annum once the system had gone live and stabilised. That is largely driven from automating and bringing manual processes onto the solution. At the moment, we have 1,000 staff involved in finance and HR activities. I cannot remember the exact number, but around 120 staff are just doing finance and budgeting. Moving all of that online on the system and automating it will generate a need for fewer staff to do those manual processes. That is probably the main dimension of how the £14 million was calculated. As I said, it was calculated a number of years ago. We are now going through the process of designing and building the system and understanding who will do what and what level of automation we can build in. As we get closer to going live, we will refine those savings and look for opportunities to identify further savings.

Some of it will be difficult to quantify. For example, 10% to 20% of my time during the week might be spent on trying to manage off-system spreadsheets or trying to navigate a clunky HR system. That should all disappear, so every individual should have a saving, in a sense, that will allow them to dedicate more time to doing the job that they are there to do rather than dealing with finance and HR systems that are not efficient and effective. We should see further opportunities as the solution develops over time.

One of the biggest benefits for me from the solution is that it will provide data and insights. We will have much more clarity around our financial position and our workforce, and amalgamating that data is really important to allow us to understand our resources and how best to redeploy them. We are working closely with our colleagues in HR on the people strategy. They are doing work on workforce planning, job families and professions. That will be built into the new solution as well. People will have clear career paths and be able to identify opportunities for them to move, not necessarily across Departments but to follow a career path in a particular profession that might take them into multiple Departments throughout their career. There are real opportunities to enrich what our staff can do and give them greater opportunities to avail themselves of those.

Mr Kingston: Including opening up other positions that they could move to or, as you say, career paths?

Mr Duffy: For example, we are starting to remove a lot of that transactional work. We have accountants in the Civil Service who are processing information on spreadsheets. What we really want them to do is look at the data and analyse it, provide their insight and help inform decision-making. That is a much richer role for an accountant than to try to reconcile what one spreadsheet said from one month to the next. There are real opportunities to get the best out of the talent that we have.

Mr Kingston: It sounds as though the £14 million is based on workforce savings, but you feel that there is potential for greater tangible benefits and efficiencies.

Mr Duffy: Absolutely. It is difficult when you are writing a business case four years before you go live to be precise about some of the numbers, but it is important that we try to have some indication of what those may be to help demonstrate the value for money. As we get close to the date to go live, the numbers will be refined, and there will be, I suspect, further opportunities.

Mr Kingston: I asked earlier about AI being built into the system on the finance side of things to help identify any causes for concern, such as irregular or excessive spending or potential error or fraud, and flag those up through financial monitoring: can you say something about that?

Mr Duffy: As I said, the Oracle solution will evolve greatly over the next few years. AI will offer us huge benefits. We have a significant amount of data, and it can be challenging for an individual to spot patterns or anomalies. The opportunity to use AI and machine learning to crunch those numbers and flag any issues will absolutely be there for the future. We have had some discussions with the Northern Ireland Audit Office (NIAO) about the opportunities that AI presents for it too. It does a huge exercise every year to try to identify those issues. The opportunity for the Audit Office to use a tool such as AI should release savings and capacity in order for it to do other things.

Mr Kingston: OK. Thank you.

Mr Harvey: It is good to see you. We know that it is a complex and secure system, but is it easily updated or adapted?

Mr Duffy: The way Oracle works is that, every quarter, it releases to all Oracle customers new functionality that it has tested. As new technology comes on board and as AI develops and evolves, Oracle may develop new AI tools that it will roll out as part of its quarterly patching. There is a real opportunity for us to have such continuous improvement and new technology going forward. As I said, that is one of the lessons learned from previous systems that, in some cases, were outdated by the time they went live. In a sense, the system should never go out of date.

Mr Harvey: Can it be adapted to suit the needs?

Mr Duffy: We have to be careful with the adaptation bit, because what we do not want to do is tailor the system to meet our needs, thinking that we are any different from any other large organisation or government organisation. The solution has been built around best practice in finance and HR. There would have to be a strong argument for why we could not adopt best practice. You want to minimise adaptation as much as possible.

Ms Murray: The real power that we want to tap into is flexibility of scale. We want to produce a solution that arm's-length bodies, for example, could come on to and make use of. We want to leverage that adaptability and flexibility to build something based on best practice that smaller bodies could come on to, use and experience the benefit of as well.

Mr Harvey: The old systems lasted roughly 20 years. What will the lifespan of the new system be?

Mr Duffy: Given that it will be continually updated, it will not have a definitive lifespan. It should evolve over time. Although the Account NI system was developed, built and put in place in 2006, changes and modifications to it have been made since that time, but those have been limited. Because the system is heavily customised, any modifications are costly, and that has minimised the amount of technological change to legacy systems.

Mr Harvey: What has been the greatest challenge to date with the new system?

Ms Murray: That is a good question.

Mr Duffy: It depends what week it is when you ask.

The programme has been a bit stop-start at times, which has been hugely challenging. In 2023-24, our funding was not confirmed until November of that financial year, which meant that we had to pause the programme, so we lost a lot of good people who had been working on it. When the programme was stood up again, we had to recruit people to replace them, and, when we were doing that, we were not developing the system. It has been stop-start a lot because of funding uncertainty. It comes back to Gerry's point: if you have a multi-year programme, certainty about what your funding will be over its life cycle will deliver a better value-for-money solution. Stop-start increases costs, and funding has been an issue. There is also the capacity of our stakeholders to co-design a process with us while being busy doing their day jobs. Those are the two biggest challenges. The third challenge — sorry, I know that you asked for one — is data. It is one of the risks that pop up in most programmes, and we are going through that process at the moment. It is a high-risk area.

Ms Murray: I echo what Paul said. The bottom line is that the programme is complex. Introducing new technology is a fantastic opportunity for us to correct other aspects of how finance and HR work that do not particularly serve the outcomes that we want to achieve. However, doing that requires extra effort and thought and adds a new dimension of management to what we need to deliver.

While ensuring that we involve all the right people at the right time has been a challenge, that has definitely been met by the business, which has grasped the opportunity, seeing it as a fantastic way forward and what is needed to address all the pain points that, we know, are experienced, whether by an employee, a budget holder, a job applicant, a supplier or the people who deliver our finance and HR. The business has met us in addressing that, but there is a lot to be balanced. It is complicated, and there are a lot of interdependencies that are not immediately obvious. The more you get into the detail, the more those things are understood, and that creates more to manage and coordinate.

Mr Duffy: I will add one thing, which is more of an opportunity that the programme has presented outside the benefits that the programme itself will deliver. We have had to work closely with HR and finance colleagues, saying, "We need to update our policies and processes, and this is a real opportunity to do that. If you update your policies and processes, we can build a solution that supports them". It has been a catalyst in driving some of that work. It is a secondary benefit of having a programme that requires certain things to be done that, if not for our programme driving them, might take longer.

Mr Harvey: I will finish on the move from BT and Fujitsu to Oracle. Were BT and Fujitsu not competitive in that procurement? Did they not come to you saying, "Look, we can do this for you"?

Mr Duffy: There was a robust procurement process. All suppliers had an opportunity to tender for the work. We went through an evaluation and selected the best-value option for the Civil Service.

Mr Harvey: OK. Fair enough. Good answer. Thank you very much.

Miss Hargey: Thanks very much for the presentation and for hosting us today.

On the one hand, it makes sense to move from a manual system to a digital one. We were in Land and Property Services (LPS) recently, and we saw how that manual system slows everything down. It makes sense to speed up the system, to integrate it and to have better outcomes faster. What will be the impacts on Departments in terms of the silo approach and mentality on delivering outcomes? Will the new digital system start to deal with that mentality, and are there other opportunities for this to be widened? Once you get the finance and HR functions up and running, could it be developed further to try to break down that silo approach of the Departments?

Mr Duffy: There is an opportunity to have a more holistic insight into the financing of our workforce. At the moment, it is difficult within a Department, especially on the finance side of things, because everything is manually driven and on spreadsheets. It is difficult to make that joined-up connection of opportunities across any individual Department, but this will join up a lot of examples in Departments. At the most strategic level, the Executive level, the information will be more timely, and you will have the opportunity to do your "What if?" scenarios as well as scenario planning — if you were to do x, y and z, what would the outcomes be. That is cumbersome with spreadsheets, and the system will allow you to do that, so there is definitely an opportunity there.

When you think about the health and education sectors and the spend in those areas, our main thing to ensure is how we bring in their data, as that would then allow a more holistic presentation of the public-sector spend. Some of those things are day-2 issues, but the opportunities and the facilities will be there to do it. At the moment, our system is much too difficult and clunky to do it.

Miss Hargey: Hopefully, then, with that up-to-date and live information being more readily available, there will be the opportunity to innovate more. In terms of being risk-averse, we are sometimes too risk-averse to try new ways of working.

The other bit was around inclusion and things like reasonable adjustments for people with disabilities and childcare responsibilities and flexible working across all of the systems and for the staff who use those systems. Can the system respond to some of those needs on the inclusion piece?

Mr Duffy: We are not changing any policies on those issues. The processes will be there to, hopefully, make the system much easier to navigate if you are looking for a reasonable adjustment. That is why we spoke of the chatbot: it will give people information that may be difficult to find from the current policies. For example, if someone wants to know whether they are entitled to x, they need to ask, "Which policy do I need to look at? Where do I find that policy?" and then, when they have it, "Whereabouts in the 100-page policy do I find that information?". Whereas, with a chatbot, it is only a matter of asking it a question, and it will throw up the answer for you. The information will be there for people to understand their entitlements. For us to be able to systemise that or put it into a process will make it easier for people to navigate and have visibility. If someone asks for something, they should be able to find the answer rather than going into an information black hole and getting anxious about whether they will get an outcome.

Miss Hargey: So that process should be able to track that through the online system.

Mr Duffy: Yes. We have done a little work with our groups on inclusion and disability on access to the system so that it is easier to navigate for people with disabilities or for people who may find it challenging. Some of those groups are part of our co-design process, and we are making sure that those processes are easier to use for every member of our workforce.

Miss Hargey: Good point. It takes me half an hour trying to find something online. I am still on pen and paper.

The other bit was around Account NI. I know that the high cost per transaction is one of the main criticisms of the current system. Will there be improved outcomes on that?

Mr Duffy: I honestly do not know the answer to that question. I will be happy to look at it and come back to you.

Miss Hargey: My other question was about data. This is the way of the world now, but data and who owns it and has access to it is key, particularly when you look at some of the global digital companies. You have touched briefly on who has access to data in the Civil Service. What are the firewalls and safety mechanisms when it comes to external companies? Are there firewalls around people's data? I presume that, when it comes to those who procure services, we are keeping their data tight as well.

Ms Murray: Yes, absolutely, there are firewalls. The cloud-based technology platform that we are moving to allows data to be stored on a server in a cloud — a data centre. The data centre where our data will be is used exclusively for government bodies such as ours; it is referred to as the "government cage". There are additional security requirements and wrappers around that, so that information is stand-alone and is not sitting in with other, more corporate organisations.

We have done our data impact assessment and we are working with all of our suppliers and the individuals in this space. There are tight security requirements, even around the clearances that individuals must have and where they must be located, before they can come and have a look at anything or do anything for us. That is built in, Deirdre, and, similarly, with the role-based access that Paul described, we are building it in by design that individuals should see only the information that they need to do their job. That counts, too, on the reporting and analytics capabilities, where the information is pushed to people. It means that, if I were to move to a different Department in the morning, I would no longer access DOF staff information but would have access to my new line-management structure in my new Department. That is the approach that we are taking.

Miss Hargey: Thank you.

The Deputy Chairperson (Ms Forsythe): Thank you very much, Paul and Kirstie. That was really informative. Thank you for hosting us and for your hospitality. I ask you to extend our thanks to all of your staff for taking the time to speak to us and for being so welcoming. We really appreciate that. We look forward to seeing how the project progresses.