Indigenous organization builds wealth and community with technology

Impressive development

In the 1950s, forestry operations in British Columbia opened up access routes to Takla Lake, approximately 350 kilometers north of Prince George. This ended the isolation for the resident community known as Takla Landing, although the area remains difficult to access and has little or no phone coverage. Recently, the local store, school, and band administration office gained a unique satellite internet connection. Around 250 Takla Nation members largely engage in harvesting, hunting, and fishing, maintaining their traditions, their community, and the 27,000 or so square kilometers of their traditional territory.

Connection with the broader province of British Columbia, however tentative, didn’t bring with it a corresponding increase in opportunity for the Nation or a share of the flourishing modern economy. About six years ago, this situation prompted Takla Nation’s Chief and Council to devise an ambitious plan to build capacity, bring economic wealth, and help develop a self-sustaining environment for the Nation. A partnership was created between the Takla Nation and the Sasuchan Development Corporation (SDC), which is now the Nation’s economic arm. Success was impressive and came relatively quickly. The then SDC Director of Finance Nick Fuchs says, “Over about three years, we went from zero revenue to around 20 million dollars.”

Equally impressive is how Sasuchan, , and the Takla Nation, continue to manage the complex relationship between economic development and respect for the land, community, and culture.

Increasing visibility into a growing organization

The partnership creates and buys businesses that have strong potential to be profitable for the Nation, with the expectation that as the resulting projects involve more and more Takla Nation members, the community as a whole benefits from the inflow of funds. However, the existing businesses acquired by the partnership often came with differing corporate cultures, workflows, and technologies, which at times, hinders the speed of communication and collaboration. Fuchs notes, “In the early days, we were buying businesses, each with its own IT infrastructure, and just trying to bring everything under one roof. Crucial business information was everywhere and hard to get hold of. We needed to consolidate around a single solution that everyone could easily use and then build a coherent organization in service of our goals.”

With enthusiastic support from SDC CEO Steve Nycholat, Fuchs and his team identified Microsoft 365 as a common denominator among the partnership’s businesses, and they had already decided to replace paper-based business workflows with Dynamics 365 Business Central. “As we dug into Business Central, we realized we could use it to start streamlining our complete infrastructure,” Fuchs recalls. “We already used Microsoft Teams. We added Teams Phone to consolidate voice. We already had our Microsoft 365 license, so we decided to try to consolidate everything under that one solution.”

He brought in BDO Lixar, a member of the Microsoft Partner Network, to consult on enterprise resource planning practices. Shafina Hassam, Modern Workplace Practice Manager at BDO Lixar, guided the partnership’s broader consolidation effort. “We helped Sasuchan design a future-state workplace with no walls, a seamless way to access people, knowledge and information, with Microsoft 365,” says Hassam. “Everyone now has easier, more consistent access to not only information to get their jobs done, also reporting across the board. Through Power BI dashboards, the executive team has visibility into the status of every project, the budget remaining, the number of resources, whether things are on track, and how best to address challenges. Increased visibility and more proactive control are big wins.”

Engaging business, people, and community with Viva Connections

Sasuchan HR Generalist Brooklyn Wilson points out that along with business and economic success, the technology must also serve another equally important goal. “We want the Nation to be able to support itself on its own terms by creating sustainable careers and employment,” she says. Fuchs adds, “We’re always looking to bring new people into the organization, especially young superstars from the community, and we have a strong internship program. It would be nice at the end of the day if the entire operation were run by members of the First Nation.”

Hassam suggested Microsoft Viva Connections as a great fit for Sasuchan, and the organization adopted it to better connect the people, projects, and individuals involved with the community all through the familiar Teams platform. It’s one of the modules within the Microsoft Viva employee experience platform, which integrates with Microsoft Teams to provide a one-stop shop for employees to discover, learn, and collaborate. For example, Wilson uses Viva Connections to make onboarding easier for new employees and interns, many of whom have varying degrees of experience with technology. “With our rapid growth—doubling headcount over the past year—onboarding used to be a huge struggle,” says Wilson. “But now, you just need to access your Viva Connections dashboard and you have everything you need for your work. It used to take us a week to get someone updated and onboarded with their teams and projects. Now, they’re ready to hit the ground running in about a day and a half.”

Building on success

Wilson offers multiple illustrations of how Sasuchan’s new digital workplace helps build success for the community. One example provides a strikingly literal illustration of how its adoption of technology has helped the Takla Nation build community. “The Nation’s council set us a goal of building 10 houses a year on the reserve for the next 10 years,” she says. “This year, we actually have 14 homes under construction, which is a lot of work, requiring a lot of data, people, suppliers, and coordination. Having the Microsoft 365 modern workplace solutions in place makes everything much more efficient and is helping us exceed our goals.”

Community contractors, who carry out key parts of those projects, also benefit from Sasuchan’s new digital capabilities. Wilson says, “With these new solutions, we’re able to better support our contractors and manage the work they’re doing. That’s really helped get them involved and drive the great revenue growth we’ve seen in the past few years.” SDC business has grown from around 8 contractors and $2M in revenue, to 22 contractors helping generate some $8M. Fuchs sums it up by adding, “Building on our Microsoft 365 and Teams–based infrastructure, we added Viva Connections and gained a further level of coordination and accessibility. Pretty soon everything that had seemed so complex started to become simpler.”

Empowering the community

Hassam has delivered group and personal training sessions to help Sasuchan staff come up to speed with their Microsoft modern workplace features and practices. She also configured SharePoint to support highly secure communications and file sharing with external vendors, which Wilson describes as, “Introducing a simple, accessible solution for what once was a major bottleneck for us.” Next, Hassam proposes adding Viva Learning to its centralized employee hub. Viva Learning will provide employees with micro-learning opportunities and consolidated access to learning platforms. In the long-term, the plan is to use Viva Topics. “We can unlock huge value by adding some automatic classification for invoices, contracts, and other document types, this will be a gift to their employees” Hassam says.

These and other technology-driven initiatives will serve the overarching goal of empowering the members of the Takla Nation. Wilson says, “It will be great to see Takla Nation members take on more roles within Sasuchan. That’s really what we’re working toward—self-reliance and self-government.”

Fuchs, too, reflects on the progress made and is grateful for the time he spent working for the partnership. “It’s pretty amazing to see how much the Nation has achieved through the partnership with the help of this technology. To jumpstart the community’s participation in where the world is heading, and see the progress they’re making, well, I get a little emotional to be honest.”

Find out more about the Takla Lake Limited Partnership and the Sasuchan Development Corporation on Facebook and LinkedIn. Learn more about the Takla First Nation.