Department of Public Expenditure & Reform

Established in 2013, the office of the government Chief Information Officer at the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform (DPER) is responsible for developing and implementing an ICT strategy for the Irish Public Service with the main goal of ensuring an efficient, shared and integrated approach to ICT across all departments delivering new innovative digital services and enhancing the use of the Governments information assets. DPER partnered with Storm Technology to develop and implement three centralised applications e-submission, e-parliamentary question and e-docs.

E-Submissions digitalises the internal submissions processes in the form of informational updates, briefing notes or discussions that are part of the everyday communications between Departmental staff, Ministers and the Secretary General. These need to managed, recorded and treated in line with approved policies and procedures.

E-Parliamentary questions refers to the 51,000 yearly parliamentary questions raised by Deputies to Government Ministers relating to Public affairs connected with their departments. With accurate responses required within a strict time frame, a custom framework was needed to automate this process with SharePoint.

E-docs provides a central source of information across departments managing the full life-cycle of information assets from creation ,capture, saving, sharing, changing and searching which enhances user experience and saves time.

These applications helped DPER in their journey towards better digitisation and utilisation of the Governments information assets. All applications were designed with a SharePoint architecture that contextualised and structured data in a manner that allowed users to easily retrieve relevant data.