Pilot Project Being Developed                        For Municipal Reference Model

September 1, 2008 -- Municipal officials across Canada have shown widespread interest in the Municipal Reference Model (MRM)  and steps are being taken to turn the concept into reality with a pilot project.

Encouraged by positive response to a series of recent webinars explaining the MRM, leaders of the initiative are in discussions with a group of municipalities interested to conduct a pilot project that would establish the MRM as a Web-based service – which ultimately would be available to all municipalities in Canada.

Decisions on the structure and participants of the pilot project will be made this fall, reports Roy Wiseman of the Region of Peel, Ontario, who is chair of the Steering Committee of MISA/ASIM Canada’s Municipal Reference Model Version 2 Project.

The Steering Committee has endorsed a recommendation to work with IBM, using IBM’s Industry Business Value Assessment (IBVA) process to further assess both the business need and the technological approach for the proposed service. 

The recommendation to work with IBM is based on evaluation of responses to a request for information issued to vendors in late 2007.  The project team will be meeting with a selected number of municipalities to gather their input into this process, which is scheduled to be complete by the end of October.

MISA/ASIM Canada staged a series of interactive webinars on July 8, 10 and 15 to address the evolution and future of the MRM. Each of the webinars attracted a national audience of more than 100 municipal IT and service-delivery officials, the majority of whom expressed support for the MRMv2 project and optimism that their municipalities would be prepared to support it financially.

Audio recordings and PDF presentation slides from those webinars can be accessed from www.golcommunications.ca/MRM2/webcast_references.html.

The MRM, originally introduced in the 1990s, is being redeveloped in a national project as an automated tool to give Canadian municipalities a common way to define and classify their services, organize them by program, and devise performance measures for them.

MISA/ASIM Canada’s goal with the Municipal Reference Model Version 2 Project is to enable municipalities to effectively communicate and interact with each other and with other levels of government in improving or aligning services.

The webcasts were sponsored in part by Adobe and organized by GOL Communications.  They included presentations by senior municipal executives from Saint John, Windsor and Toronto, as well as by Chartwell Inc. and by Roy Wiseman .

Read about the MRMv2 Project