§ Mr. HoonTo ask the Secretary of State for Health how many lines of computer code there are in his Department's computer systems. [5349]
§ Mr. HoramThe Department uses a number of proprietary software packages. For these, information on the number of programs or lines of source code is known only to the supplier.
The Department is carrying out an inventory of those bespoke information technology systems that will still be in use in 2000 as part of our strategy for dealing with the year 2000 date change issues, but compilation of the inventory is not yet complete.
§ Mr. HoonTo ask the Secretary of State for Health how many separate computer programmes his Department operates. [5358]
§ Mr. HoramThere is no universal definition of what constitutes a computer program; a formula on a single line of code could be said to be a program. However, the Department, excluding next steps agencies, is currently responsible for 140 major software systems.