Going back to 1998, I would say not. I would say that by 2006-07 we were starting to realize that we had an aging application infrastructure, which is what your Auditor General referred to.
In about 2008 we started a program that we called our major application portfolio maps, where we took a proposal forward to cabinet that said we had risk-rated...we looked at our whole suite of applications in government, and there were about 2,200 applications running across all of our ministries. We said, of those applications, how many are absolutely business critical, where service to individuals and businesses would be impacted. We had a list of 250 of those applications that were considered business critical.
We then went through a risk-rating exercise, mostly from a technology perspective, but also a little bit from the business side. In fairness, it was mostly a technology study of what was most at risk. We came up with a set of 77 applications that we felt were the applications most at risk—if they fell over we were in danger of not being able to bring those applications back. It was purely age. We asked for some money. We didn't get that; we got a portion of that to actually start working through those 77 applications. That program finishes March 31 of 2012. Today we have remediated about 70 of the 77 applications, and there are some really big ones that are taking longer. They're funded, and we're actually working on them, and there are probably about two years to run.
I would say, from an application modernization perspective, which is specifically what the Auditor General was referring to, the infrastructure consolidation did not address that, no, but the end result of having gone through an infrastructure consolidation means that we are in a better position now to ensure that from an infrastructure perspective we're not dealing with archaic or out-of-date or unsupported hardware, operating systems, or packages.
I wouldn't say it's a direct correlation, but there has absolutely been a very positive outcome from having done the infrastructure piece first.