This afternoon I chaired a meeting of the EESC’s IT Steering Committee, which brings together our IT services with our IT users (senior management) to discuss and approve the Committee’s IT work plan and to make sure that the present and future needs of the operational services will be adequately supported. IT policy is by its very nature long-term and it is important that we should get this bit of the governance equation right, particularly in a period of austerity, when resources will be particularly scarce and investments more fiercely scrutinised. The big projects on our agenda today were our future migration to a European Commission software package for the management of human resources, the improvement of an in-house work-flow management programme, the creation of a pilot civil society consultative platform and the electronic management and archiving of documents. Thanks to the excellent preparatory work of super-Bernard (to whom go grateful thanks) all went very well.