I took over on September 19. I think it's fair to say that there were significant opportunities to improve our relationship with Shared Services Canada in ensuring that we had the necessary capacity in the form of disk space and servers and so on for us to be able to do our job and make sure we weren't putting our ability at risk to put out information on a timely basis. We embarked on a formal arrangement, an agreement that Ron Parker, the head of Shared Services Canada, and I penned. We established a very robust governance structure between our two organizations to make sure we were going to minimize any risks associated with the lack of sufficient technical infrastructure that we needed as an agency to do our business.
We broke out the work into phases, and within those phases we broke them out into stages. We had a fairly robust planning session, very collaborative, between our two organizations to prioritize the work, to acquire the necessary hardware and software, to make sure that it was installed in a certain manner and tested and so on, as I just spoke about earlier. I'm pleased to report that we are working as planned. The risks to the inadequacy of the infrastructure that we require have significantly diminished. There's still work to do, and we continue to do that of course, but I think you can see that we're not putting our dissemination plans at any risk.
In addition to that, I just want to also clarify that in no way does Shared Services Canada tell us what we can collect or whom we can collect from. That's explicit in the agreement that we signed. They have absolutely no say whatsoever, as with any other vendor that we may work with externally or internally to the government, about how we go about doing our business. They never have, and they never will tell us how to go about doing what we know best. There is no real issue about their interference in statistical matters. As I said, we are putting more and more controls in place to ensure that this infrastructure is managed properly over time. As our programs increase, of course there's a necessity for an increased infrastructure. We want to make sure the resources are there for them to do their job and for us to make sure that we get what we need to do our job, and that we're always going to be vigilant about who has access to information about Canadians.