Yes, thank you.
This has been a major project, actually going back several years. Just to give some context to you, colleagues, as I said the last time I appeared here, when I became minister I inherited the tail end of a really antiquated operational system in the department. This wasn't the fault of the public servants; it was, frankly, the fault of the lack of investment in information technology over years. We had basically a huge global paper-based system. So you can imagine in a mission like New Delhi storehouses filled with stockpiled, warehoused applications.
From time to time you're going to get additional operational resources available in one mission, but to move things around that would literally mean taking physical files in New Delhi, putting them in shipping containers and shipping them across the continent to Warsaw. It was ridiculous, with everyone making paper applications and sometimes documents getting lost. So the department realized that we had to move into the 21st century in terms of technology, which is why we went through a long process of development, of selection of the vendors, and finally got cabinet approval for a significant investment in global case management for a total of $300 million and change in 2006-2007.
Now I'm pleased to report that we are well into global implementation of the GCMS system. The deputy says it's finished. This basically opens us up to taking online electronic applications that go into the system, and these applications are accessible at any one of our offices around the world. That means if there's flexibility in one office, we can take applications that have been made in India and work on them in Ottawa, or vice-versa.
Claudette, would you like to supplement this?