If I may, Mr. Chair, I would like to add something to what Ms. Forand just said.
As she stated, I worked for Privy Council before the organization was created. The data available to us was very important. If we had had access to that data through the departments, that would have given us an advantage and helped us develop somewhat more detailed plans. We had permission to look at global data from all departments, but it was highly variable. The data from some departments was very good data, but not so good from others.
Looking back, it is hard to understand why that was the case. At the time, it was spread out everywhere and there were different approaches, different versions of data and different definitions of what IT was. As a result, we could not consolidate the data at the time, aggregate it, and develop much more detailed plans than those that Shared Services Canada had inherited. I'm talking about high-level plans and business cases. The consolidation and standardization approach had been used elsewhere, in the private and public sector alike.
At the time, searching for data was also important. As Ms. Forand indicated—Mr. Nicholl will be able to speak to this since they gathered data—, it took a number of months to do this even though the Government of Canada is not like a private corporation, whose data is less accessible. In any case, it was not accessible at the time. So we expected that it would take a number of months and we did not have much time.
The objective was to develop high-level business plans and implementation plans. Then, once the delivery team was in place—I moved with the team at that time—, more detailed plans would be created. We had to look for all the data, and we searched for nearly a year. We counted every server and every data centre.
To give you an idea, when I was at Privy Council, we thought there might be about 200 data centres in government. We based this number on interviews with chief information officers, officials from each department, and DM and ADM committees. We thought there might be 200 or so, but after a year we had counted 495, and I am still discovering others today.