Chief Financial Officer for the City of Grande Prairie, Danielle Whiteway provided an update to Grande Prairie City Council’s Financial and Administrative Services Committee regarding the recently implemented Enterprise Resource Planning system for city administration.
According to the city, the ERP is a cloud-based system that streamlines communication between city departments and has been an item of discussion since 2021.
Whiteway says implementation of the system has increased transparency and accountability of business processes in Grande Prairie and enhances city employee experience by centralizing all data entry into one system.
“We’re a multi-million dollar organization, we’re accountable to the public, to other levels of government, and really to our own organization in terms of data availability, and just sharing of information,” she says. “This system has allowed us to sort of turn multiple systems into one, which allows for a flow of data and information between departments and users.”
As the city continues to adopt newer technology such as Artificial Intelligence and centralized systems like the ERP, questions surrounding cybersecurity were brought forward by numerous councillors and Whiteway says cybersecurity training for staff is currently underway.
“The city, predominantly in the ITS department is always looking for new ways, and AI is something that’s becoming more and more utilized,” she says. “We know that it’s coming, we’re using it as we can, but also adapting our cybersecurity measures accordingly too.”
Whiteway adds that the average Grande Prairie resident will have a more positive experience when dealing with city representatives as the ERP takes a significant amount of workload off city employees.
“Sometimes the things that happen behind the scenes to support our more public-facing services are not maybe as obvious to everybody, citizens alike,” she says. “The everyday resident may not see direct benefit, but indirectly I think it makes for smoother-run operations, it takes some workload off folks that are providing more frontline services for citizens, so their attention can be more where it needs to be.”
City Council’s Financial and Administrative Services Committee received Whiteway’s report for information on March 5th.
