To ask the Secretary of State for Defence what assessment he has made of the merits of switching to the Defence Information Infrastructure version F computer system from the Defence Information Infrastructure version C; and if he will make a statement. (175017)

[holding answer 17 December 2007]: The long-term aim of the MOD is to implement a single information infrastructure across Defence; the Defence Information Infrastructure Future (DII(F)). The Defence Information Infrastructure Convergence (DII(C)) project was implemented at specific sites to bridge the gap between ageing legacy systems in MOD, which were going out of service, and DII(F) being available.

DII(F) is being rolled out now to become the primary information infrastructure across the MOD and is replacing many ageing legacy systems and DII(C) as planned. DII(F) will provide common core infrastructure services which meet the security, technical and interoperability demands of the MOD jointly across the business and battle space and will provide access to the applications required to support and enable the delivery of MOD’s outputs.

To ask the Secretary of State for Defence what the estimated cost is of changing from Defence Information Infrastructure version F to Defence Information Infrastructure version C; and how many officials worked on making the change. (175018)

[holding answer 17 December 2007]: Defence Information Infrastructure Convergence (DII(C)) was a precursor infrastructure to Defence Information Infrastructure Future (DII(F)) and was only implemented for a subset of the eventual DII(F) user community. DII(C) was implemented at specific sites to bridge the gap between the ageing legacy systems in MOD going out of service and DII(F) being available. DII(C) will eventually be subsumed by DII(F).