I'll start. Thank you for the question.
I think it's important to note the complex environment we operate in—as I was discussing during one of the last questions—which is the complexity of the number of departments that are involved. A number of entities are responsible for managing their own inventory of goods. The other piece is that, when Shared Services was created, it was a mishmash of technology that was thrown together and handed over to this new agency, saying, “Figure it out.”
The agency didn't invest in its tooling at the beginning. There wasn't money to do that. Really, the money was to just keep it running and hope we could do that. We managed to make some good progress in things like cyber-defence with our colleagues at CSE. That is why EVAS is back on track. We had to work with the vendor. There are some things around needing to make sure the software and the packages we bought were working securely. The pandemic did delay the procurement process.
At the same time, this is a space where the market is evolving very quickly, so we have shifted from a very static project management process that is long-term to a very agile project delivery process that is about rolling out minimum viable product quickly to accelerate that. That's why we've gone from zero deployments to 35,000 desktops so far. It will be at 87,000 desktops by the end of this year, so it's starting to fill that gap. However, there are over 100 departments and agencies we have to work with. That is one of the complicating factors.
The second piece, for us, is how we make sure that information is available to those departments so they can see what their users have. It is an environment that.... There are very few organizations in the world that work the way we do, because of the vertical silos. Mr. Rochon was talking about the authorities, but then we have this horizontal organization that does infrastructure, so there are things we have to work with the vendors on. Those have all been overcome now.
Now it is about—not to trivialize this—lather, rinse, repeat: Get the deployment, get into the department, get it deployed, move to the next one and get it deployed, and do that on a priority basis to get that visibility.