By IAN ROSS
The creation of a regional Information and Communication Technology (ICT) facility in Blind River is expected to lay the foundation for a high-tech base for the North Shore.
The facility is part of the town’s IT strategy to build technology capacity within the community of 5,000 and the surrounding area to assist in the transition to a knowledge-based economy.
The Blind River Development Corp. (BRDC) is acting as the project leader in implementing an innovative, online municipal services application for the ICT centre.
The development corporation struck a partnership deal in January with Kelowna. B.C.-based Vadim Software, the largest manufacturer of municipal finance software, to deliver integrated municipal solutions to small municipalities across Ontario.
Vadim’s ASP (Application Service Provider) is geared to small municipalities (with populations under 5,000) on limited budgets to have integrated processing and reporting functions similar to a big city’s.
This municipal-private sector partnership will be run under the banner of the Algoma District Municipal Application Service (ADMAS), which will be run out of the ICT centre on Hanes Avenue.
FedNor and Human Resource Development Canada have contributed about $139,000 to hire four high-tech staffers and furnish the centre.
Government and local development officials believe the ICT centre will develop a full range of knowledge-based skills in the community in computer network operations, server maintenance, online municipal solutions and inbound technical call centre skills.
BRDC general manager Stoney Burton says Vadim created their ASP model with a central server with software installed on it that municipal clients
will be able to access over a private Internet-based network.
“It’s big-city software we’ve redesigned for small towns,” says Jack Richardson, the centre’s project manager, who has lured three former Blind River
residents back home from high-tech jobs in Ottawa, North Bay and Elliot Lake to staff the centre.
The software was currently being used by the Town of Blind River in late April and the partners intend to market it to other Ontario towns.
Eventually, the ADMAS project is designed to be a self-sustaining, stand-alone project that soon will be incorporated as a spin-off company, separate from the development corporation.
In preparing the town’s IT strategy, Burton says rather than chase down the boom-and-bust employment scenarios associated with hosting outbound call centres, they concentrated on opportunities to create a technology base, stock a talent pool of high tech jobs, and later on provide a source of tech support to private enterprise.
Due to lack of a business case, Blind River was one of the last communities in the Algoma district to get high-speed Internet, a source of frustration for the Blind River Development Corp that stunted any plans to develop high tech capacity.
Within the last few years, AdNet, a non-profit regional service provider, has invested in telecommunications infrastructure and installed high-speed access points throughout the Algoma district.
Recently other publicly owned and private Internet providers have rolled out high-speed services for commercial and residential customers.
Burton says the current focus of their IT strategy is ensure the ADMAS project is established and delivers a superior quality service to client municipalities.
Over the next few months, the BRDC’s board of directors will have discussions on ways and means to chase other opportunities.
One opportunity they are investigating might fill a specific need in the call centre industry.
The BRDC is examining the potential of creating a spin-off company offering an “over-load service” to big call centre companies across Ontario and the U.S. to handle small contracts.
“When you have small contracts on behalf of a client, and it’s too much of a re-work to install the client-tracking software and hire the people specifically for that function,” explains Burton, “maybe that’s something we can house for them by providing the office space and hook-ups to execute that contract fairly efficiently and at lower cost than it would be downtown Toronto.
“There are a number of opportunities that open up once you have a (technology) base in place.”
