Information Technology
People & Culture This initiative of the Human Resources Department centres on modernizing and standardizing the types of staff positions, responsibility levels, and lines of authority. It will allow for fair and transparent advancement, and equitable salary levels and comparisons. Employees and managers attended workshops on their role descriptors, which were drafted and sent to a consultant for review. Also under the People & Culture banner, APEGA’s vacation policy was updated, and a new whistleblower policy and procedure were created. Finance We streamlined our accounts payable process in 2018, moving from a stamp-and- paper system to an online workflow. We also eliminated cheque payments by converting to electronic fund transfers. We achieved: -- faster vendor approval and payment cycles -- a reduction in administration work for management and staff -- savings on paper, mailing, reconciling, follow-up, and more We’ve enhanced our forecast and budget templates, customizing them for each department. A user-friendly layout helps staff clearly understand what they are forecasting and budgeting for. This results in an intuitive, clean, and easy-to-follow process for management, and reduces budget-time stress. We also integrated our business planning and budgeting cycles in 2018, creating a streamlined process that brings together staff expertise from the Business Performance and Finance Departments. This has resulted in a more efficient and meaningful system, putting business thinking into planning.
We cut our cybersecurity risk score in half, by implementing 50 mitigation plans. These included putting a system in place to monitor the APEGA computer network. The system learns normal behaviours and alerts us about suspicious activity. We also strengthened our password systems and added protections to keep staff and guests away from bad internet locations. A new staff intranet portal was put in place in 2018. Called OWL, this is an online centre for employees to communicate and collaborate. It includes news, staff directories and information, departmental and divisional pages, and easy-access links for common tasks. OWL, the third intranet site in APEGA’s history, offers up an improved method of communicating across our organization. So far, so good, say APEGA staff members. Work continued to modernize our member management system, which stores member and permit holder information. This is the central system for delivering a host of services to our members and permit holders. Work underway will put into use the latest software from the vendor and open the door for many improvements. The path forward is that we’ll be leveraging those improvements in 2019. Our new system of examining the experience of engineering applicants, called competency- based assessment, has a huge information technology component, so our IT staff were there to make it part of our online application system. This new method of self-reporting competencies helps APEGA become a better regulator. You can read more about it elsewhere in this report.
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