With the housing costs in the San Francisco Bay area rocketing ever higher, other municipalities are hoping to steal a slice of the high tech pie. Cities from Boston to Bangalore bill themselves as Silicon this or that, in hopes of attracting hot startups and the millennial techies that follow.
One community, however, is taking a unique approach to building its tech cred – Whistler British Columbia, in the mountains above Vancouver. Best known for hosting the alpine skiing and sliding events for the 2010 Winter Olympics, Whistler’s technology story is more about the agility of their municipal government than the fading glory of the winter games.
Canada’s First Resort Municipality
Whistler sports about 10,000 permanent residents, but their tourism businesses and natural resources attract up to 50,000 visitors per day. “Were a small town with remarkable statistics,” according to Nancy Wilhelm-Morden, Mayor of Whistler. “We’re the first resort municipality in Canada.”
The town’s resort municipality designation gives them extra sources of funding that their relatively small tax base alone wouldn’t support. “We have special and unique tools,” Wilhelm-Morden continues. “Unique taxation regulation. Unique ways of raising revenues and handling changes.”
In particular, the more accommodation revenue (hotel rooms, etc.) the resort has, the greater the share of the hotel room tax the municipality receives.
Such additional funding has supported Whistler’s infrastructure overall, but the arrival of the Olympics dramatically changed the technology infrastructure in Whistler with the addition of a fiber-optic line running from Vancouver.
Local telcos built the line to provide live high definition broadcast feeds from Olympic events in Whistler to Vancouver for transmission globally. The line also handled official Olympic communications and services, while facilitating wireless Internet at various Games’ locations throughout Whistler, according to Whistler’s web site.
From the Olympics to the Back Office
To this day, the fiber optic line attracts technology companies to the town – but ironically, the Olympics also slowed down some of Whistler’s technology improvements. “The Olympics delayed us on technology investments,” according to Heather Paul, Systems Analyst at the Whistler Municipality.
In particular, they were using an aging enterprise resource planning (ERP) system for managing the business of the municipality. “The problem was the software was seven years out of date,” Paul says. “We were spending money on support and maintenance, but we weren’t leveraging new development of the product.”
Read the entire article at http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2015/10/14/back-office-software-drives-whistler-tech-scene/.
Intellyx advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, Unit4 is an Intellyx customer. None of the other organizations mentioned are Intellyx customers. Image credit: Kate Farquharson.
