Public Accounts committee  Thank you. I would ask Madame Charette to speak to that.

Public Accounts committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. That is why I said that we agreed with the Auditor General. I think that if you do not have, as you mentioned, this feeling of urgency, it is because the priorities have been identified in most of the essential systems. The investment plans have been identified by the departments and Ms.

Public Accounts committee  Mr. Chair, I think there are two points I would make. The first is that we would move toward standardization, standard business process and streamlined business process. That would be the first step for us, and we are doing that. Madame Charette could speak to a couple of those areas.

Public Accounts committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It is a two-year action plan. We have two years to gather the information and to prepare the action plan. As for the operating budget freeze, let me distinguish between two different things. The freeze of operating budgets begins in fiscal 2010-2011, and it will apply over three years, namely 2010-2011, 2011-2012 and 2012-2013.

Public Accounts committee  I am of the view that deputy heads, Mr. Chair, are in fact well aware of the management of their responsibilities. They have, as you've seen, investment plans--

Public Accounts committee  If I may finish--

Public Accounts committee  Well, the deputy heads do inform their ministers. When those requests for funding are made, they are made to cabinet after the due process of examination and establishing the priorities. So the short answer to your question would be “yes”.

Public Accounts committee  If I may, Mr. Chair, we did not want the intent of putting forward the funding request to be the responsibility of the Treasury Board Secretariat, because the funding requests and the accountabilities for the expenditure of those funds do rest with each organization and the minister responsible for that.

Public Accounts committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. I will start, and then I will ask my colleague Ms. Charette to pick up. One of the key elements that has been mentioned, and that Ms. Fraser has also mentioned, is that we have been working with departments to ensure that they do have investment plans. We may not have a list right now of all the mission-critical systems across the government, because there are currently very varying definitions of what is a mission-critical system.

Public Accounts committee  I will ask Ms. Charette to give you a more specific answer.

Public Accounts committee  Mr. Chair, we have two major policies on the management of IT investments. One concerns investment management and planning, and the other project management. I think the work we have done—and I will ask Ms. Charette to give more detail—with the departments to make sure they have project management capacity follows from an audit made by the Office of the Auditor General in 2006.

Public Accounts committee  Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would like to thank you for having invited us to appear before the committee with regard to chapter 1 of the Auditor General's spring report, which deals with the aging information technology systems of the Government of Canada. As you pointed out, I am here with my colleague Ms.

Public Accounts committee  I would echo the Auditor General's comments about the importance of the function and note that we are on the right path to re-establishing and rebasing the function as a core element of the government's expenditure management system. Thank you.

Public Accounts committee  If I may, Mr. Chair, I would ask Mr. Smith to respond to that.

Public Accounts committee  I'll begin, and I'll turn to Mr. Smith for more information. In terms of the transparency, departments are in fact encouraged to post the evaluation reports on their websites, and they do so fairly frequently. On the sharing of data, that normally happens in terms of horizontal evaluations, where that evaluation has to cover more than one program or a program covers more than one organization.