By Greg McCormick, VP Communications and Marketing (greg.mccormick@skipatrol.ca)
At its fall meeting, the board of directors of the Canadian Ski Patrol agreed to fund the replacement of the National Database System (NDS) based on a business case presented in June and a follow-up presentation at the meeting.
This project will commence immediately and is anticipated to be online for the 2020-2021 ski season.
The board approved $70,500 to fund this project, which will be drawn from the CSP’s capital accounts. The project costs cover the cost of building the system on the CiviCRM platform, integrating with our website, migrating our current data to the new platform, and a centralized train-the-trainer program offered to division representatives.
In making this decision, the board reviewed the strategic alternatives presented by the Information Technology Team (Communications and Marketing portfolio) as well as the comments received from several zones during the consultation process this past summer.
A project steering committee has been struck, with representation from across the organization. This group will be meeting soon to complete the project charter, which will be posted to a dedicated page on our website. As the project progresses, updates will be posted to the site for all members to review and Need To Know messages will be sent to the leadership of the CSP when new material is posted.
While this is step forward for the CSP nationally, we must recognize the long-standing and herculean efforts put forth by CSP Life Members Charlie Turner (Ontario Division) and Pierre Charest (Québec Division). These two gentlemen, with additional support from Drew Martin (Mountain Division), have been the backbone for our information management system for the last 18 years. Furthermore, Eric Waddell (Ontario Division) also deserves our thanks for his work with the NDS in its early days. Eric is also the key architect of ZIMS (Zone Information Management System) which he custom-designed for Central Zone.
The following documents are available for review:
NDS Replacement Project – Fall meeting presentation – Sept 2019
Coop Symbiotic – Quote for Canadian Ski Patrol (EN)
Business Case – NDS Replacement Project (Final)
This post is also available in: French