Business Chief USA September 2019

ST. JOHN AMBULANCE CANADA
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CLICK TO WATCH: ‘ST. JOHN AMBULANCE CANADA –
LEADERS IN FIRST AID AND CPR TRAINING’
to act as a bridge.” To fund its activities,
the charity relies on the first activity to
fund the latter, as Director of Information
Systems and Technology James
Williamson explains. “We sell first aid
training, and that is then turned into
community service via volunteers and
first aid representatives at, for instance,
sports venues, conventions, and other
outdoor and indoor events. We also
give back through therapy dog programs
and similar services across the country.”
To further support such activities,
Williamson has helped to institute a
program of digital transformation
inside the organization. One of the
challenges of operating a national
charity, especially in a country as vast
as Canada, is ensuring the smooth
communication of its constituent parts.
“We are a federated organization where
each provincial chapter is its own legal
entity, and our national office serves to
supply the shared enterprise applications.
Right now, they are all hosted at
a data center run by a third party, but
as part of the digital transformation we
are moving to cloud-based services.
SEPTEMBER 2019