How CityViz helped COEDC improve support for decision making and business development.
Challenge
Central Okanagan Economic Development Commission (COEDC) tracked a number of economic indicators to monitor the state of the economy in the region. Collecting and maintaining data became a big task which required a lot of time and effort. The organization wanted to replace this procedure with a data portal that would provide the following:
- Support evidence-based decision making
- Market the Central Okanagan for business development
- Support local entrepeneurs in their market research
- Enchance sophistication and competitiveness.
Solution
COEDC looked for a solution that would suppport local economic development and planning functions and help them solve the challenges they faced and further improve it’s service to the community.
As a solution, COEDC partnered with CityViz to set up a full suite of CityViz modules at the regional level, for the whole Regional District of Central Okanagan, one of Canada’s fastest growing and most entrepreneurial regions.
Results
The COEDC organization and region as whole benefit from using CityViz in multiple ways:
The region has introduced a sophisticated tool that is seamlessly integrated into their investment profile website at: https://data.investkelowna.com
It automatically tracks all of the economic indicators they used to maintain in a very large, multi-page spreadsheet manually. CityViz eliminates big amount of staff time that was used to periodically comple this spreadsheet, as well as potential human errors in compiling that information.
CityViz keeps innovating and improving the product. A number of new datasets and features have been added to the product since the launch, to make the information even more robust and meet the needs of their audience.
“It has been a great experience for us in not only being able to provide this information to the community and we’ve had wonderful feedback from both community looking to support evidence-based decision making, as well as outside investors.
It’s also been a great way to support economic development in our community by working with the local company as their first customer and really building out this product that I think is a great asset for economic development all across the province.”
Krista Mallory, Economic Development Manager, Central Economic Development Commission