Municipal IT Trends – Looking ahead to 2024

Municipalities across Alberta continue to look to information technology to drive cost-savings, efficiency, transformation, and innovation.

Over the last two or three years, municipalities have prioritized enabling and supporting remote and hybrid working. This has led many of them to shift their IT operations to ‘the cloud,’ bolster their cyber security and adopt cloud-based document repositories (e.g., SharePoint).

Looking forward to 2024, the focus of municipal IT is ‘optimization, which includes the following trends:

• Reducing IT infrastructure footprint – along with migrating physical servers to ‘the cloud,' organizations are adopting voice over internet protocol (VoIP) technologies allowing them to get rid of their desk phones, and facilitate telecommunications via their workstations and mobile devices.
• Getting ‘the most’ out of Microsoft – annual licenses provide both users and IT organizations with a significant number of services and capability beyond just Word and Excel. From data visualization to multi-factor authentication (MFA), municipalities are looking to incorporate more Microsoft technologies into their work.
• Securing their IT environment – municipalities are dedicating more of their IT budgets to preserving the integrity of their enterprise IT as the frequency of data breaches and the associated costs of cyberattacks continue to rise. 
• Platform-based application development – Microsoft’s Power Platform provides opportunities to use low / no-code software to create workflows and applications to drive efficiencies; more municipalities are creating their apps to do things better, faster, and less expensively.

Alberta Municipalities partnered with WBM Technologies to support its members in the adoption and management of information technology.

For more information, please contact DanB [at] abmunis.ca (Dan Blackburn), Senior Director of Growth & Innovation.