What we do

We specialize in small, rural municipalities and provide fully-integrated Asset Management, GIS and BI shared services using a cloud hosted, open source platform.

The open source platform eliminates licence fees, allowing you to direct those savings to pay for a shared 'employee'.

This allows small municipalities to afford shared resources instead of spending their limited dollars on licenses while a CFO/Director struggles to find time, or develop the skillset necessary to do this specialized work while dealing with a miriad of other responsibilities.

Why should municipalities do this?

  1. Asset Management:
    • Mandated by both province and feds.
    • LDGE report is set to make AM reporting mandatory in the next year
    • Most grants now require AM reporting including infrastructure grants and gas tax funding
  2. GIS is needed for
    • Mapping parcels and PMBC integration for planning
    • Mapping assets for asset management
    • Public maps linking Assessment, Tax & Utilities to parcels
  3. Business Intelligence is essential for
    • Transparent and intuitive reporting for Council and public
    • Access to database linked asset management reports demanded by senior levels of government & for proactively managing assets

Why JI?

It's the only frugal alternative

  1. Save yourself money and time
    • Your licence fee savings more than adequately pays for a shared service role for asset management, GIS & BI
    • You are able to delegate these tasks to experienced professional
    • Your community is able to avoid substantial costs while availing multiple grant opportunities that come with a well developed asset management system
  2. Cloud based solution: Allows online access and underpins ability to share staffing
  3. Tested & Optimized: Successfully implemented in Ashcroft and tested & improved over years to be practical & useful
  4. Flexible and scalable
  5. Last but not least: Opens source & standards based

Potential licence savings

Software Licence Cost
BI US$10 per user/month to US$4,995K/month for premium licence
GIS $15K to $100K
Asset Management $15K-$150K
Web Mapping $10K
LGCAP System ~$5K
Cemetery System ~$5k

All together, using the lower ranges for the licence cost, it would cost you approx. $50K to just get started before even hiring someone or using a shared resource to do the job. Typical cost to hire sufficientlty skilled staff is outlined below.

Staffing savings

A full time AM & experienced GIS & AM professional typcially demands a salary of about $90K. Adding benefits this raises the cost to about $115K. This effectively puts this out of range of any small municipality with a small tax base. You could potentially share the position among neighbouring municipalities but the structure and cost of licences as tabulated above makes it prohibitively expensive and therefore unfeasible.

Shared Cost

The only reasonable and feasible alternative remaining is for small municipalities is to adopt a shared service model underpinned with cloud based, open source infrastructure.

The shared cost for the labour component is $24k per annum plus a nominal $1k for the cloud hosting and maintenance. This equates to the full-time professional split 5 ways among 5 municipalities.

Specifically this shared service includes

  1. Management and provision of servers, databases and applications
  2. Financial BI for council & community
  3. Asset Management
  4. GIS - Mapping with parcel maps w Utility & Tax uploads
  5. LGCAP process & mapping
  6. Cemetery App & database
  7. Tourism & Trails Mapping & imaging

Offsetting Revenue

This role is often offset by multiple additional revenue stream resulting from the work. These often include:

  1. Asset Management Grants from UBCM, FCM etc
  2. LGCAP reporting that funds ~ $50K per year
  3. Grants requiring GIS such as