Thank you, Secretary.
In fact, we will be launching very soon our work in order to develop the report, and the action plan, and the strategy that the OAG has asked us to move forward with and that we do agree is necessary. Between the period of June and December, we will be in fact conducting our own comprehensive survey of the departments across the federal government to make sure that we do get a complete inventory of mission-critical systems that is consistent to common definitions and that identifies the risks and the priorities that these departments believe these mission-critical systems are to them.
That will take us over the next six months. In December, we will then start to basically standardize and aggregate those findings so that by April we can come up with a really thorough and easy-to-understand government-wide assessment of what is mission-critical, how many are out there, what would be the overall investment required to address these, and how might we attack priorities given a situation where investment may well exceed the funds of any one department. We will be looking at that very carefully.
Then, for the next year, we will work with our CIOs across departments, who will be working with their own business stakeholders, to work out really what are the government-wide priorities that we can agree on and to focus in on what really has to be renewed, what can be consolidated or replaced, what can be sunsetted--because programs do evolve--so that by December 2011 we should have fundamentally finished our analysis, and we intend to wrap that up with a report on our recommended direction and our guidance to departments by April 2012.
I would also add that even though we have not come up with an aggregate view of certain, if you will, high-risk infrastructure, we have been working very closely with Public Works over the last eight months on a data centre strategy that involves really addressing the risk of this fundamental infrastructure across the government. We've in fact a mid-term strategy for data centres that looks at some of the more pressing data centre risks across the government, and we have a more long-term study under way, which will in fact be completed by the end of the calendar year, that will identify just what we can do moving forward on this fundamental infrastructure. We're also working with a number of other departments on different efforts on other, if you will, back-office systems and pressures, and we continue to work with departments in helping them adopt our policies so that they may assess the risk of their operational systems.