I think the other thing that we came to realize two or three years in was that it was absolutely essential to have enterprise IT planning for this to succeed. We started off, we had this great big program, and people tended to think of it as the SSC program, but really it was for the whole government.
But at the same time the Treasury Board Secretariat had a big program that they were doing. They were consolidating websites, they wanted to consolidate financial systems and consolidate HR systems, and do all of this.
Meanwhile, the DRAP process, which a member mentioned, meant that a lot of departments were re-engineering their own things, which meant that they had a lot of IT projects in order to do so. When we did an inventory of the projects that were in flight, were underway when we were created, there were more than 1,000 of them across the 43 departments.
There was no process, no governance to ask what the priority was. If Shared Services Canada is doing email transformation, should departments be investing in supporting that, in the first instance, or should they be supporting the consolidation of HR systems, or should they be supporting their own initiatives? It was an endless kind of dispute along those lines.
Enterprise planning, I would say, is something that should have been in place from the beginning.