Chair – Don Currie
Members – Mandeep Mahanger, Tom O’Brien

The big news most of us have heard is that NextGen is being delayed because Vision didn't want to enter into a contract with BCA. The NextGen team is still working hard to maintain momentum and determine what the options are going forward. A lot of effort and money has been spent to date so it must be difficult for those closely involved in the project.  The good news is that the procurement process was designed to contemplate a scenario similar to this. A second vendor that went through the initial vetting process may still be able to enter the picture.

There is no doubt that this new development will mean that the deployment of a new system will delayed. However, work already done by the NextGen team is not lost. Much of the work will be used going forward, particularly the data conversion team's efforts. The Board will meet with BCA on July 30th, to approve a decision...stay tuned.

In other news, the GIS team continues to support strategic projects rolling out an ASR layer and documentation to support this. Kristie Foster and Mark Harris have worked with Terry Keryluke and Issac Morgan to balance technical and business requirements for this solution. GIS is also putting out other layers in support of PDAP to show historical sampling and review methods over time.

The last Open Line was our first time at using Telepresence for that and it seemed to work a bit better. One office may have had issues connecting, and the NextGen team had to come down as their office is the only one in the province without a Telepresence setup. Overall the audio and video quality was far better than using WebEx.

Speaking of WebEx, training on the use of WebEx was identified some time ago as a priority for staff. Currently many field staff resort to phone contact only as they cannot easily set up audio and video in meeting rooms without seeking tech support. With remote team members being more common it would certainly be a benefit to the Org design implementation if staff more commonly used WebEx. Perhaps WebEx training or some sort of simplified step-by-step guide could be made available to all staff. Seeing your team members, even over video, is definitely more conducive to team building than simply talking on the phone.
M/S/C