4.7 The areas identified were:
■ the prices paid by other organisations for infrastructure and capital items, for example the costs of hardware, software licenses, and hardware and network maintenance, to confirm that prices paid by the Department to EDS were comparable with those paid by other organisations;
■ industry trends in the price and performance for various items of information technology infrastructure, for example, the cost of a unit of mainframe processing power (pounds per million instructions per second - £/MIPS), to confirm that the Department's choice of infrastructure was sound;
■ external salary costs compared with EDS charge-out rates, to confirm that EDS rates were competitive; and
■ EDS staff efficiency rates, principally for software development, to confirm that EDS productivity was comparable with other software developers.