§ Mr. HoonTo ask the Secretary of State for Education and Employment how many lines of computer code there are in her Department's computer systems. [5345]
§ Mr. Robin SquireThe Department uses a number of proprietary software packages and, for these, information on the number of programmes or lines of source code is known only to the supplier.
The Department is carrying out an inventory of that bespoke and proprietary software which is likely still to be in use in the year 2000 as part of our strategy for dealing with the year 2000 date change issue, but compilation of the inventory is not yet complete.
§ Mr. HoonTo ask the Secretary of State for Education and Employment how many separate computer programmes her Department operates. [5354]
§ Mr. SquireThere is no universal definition of what constitutes a computer program. A formula or a simple line of executable code could be said to be a program; however, the Department is at present responsible for 106 major software systems.