The challenge
Stonewall is a town of about 5,000 in the Interlake region of Manitoba, and no department in it has an analyst. Planning owns the planning data. Whoever owns the grant file owns the grant evidence. Administration owns the cross-departmental picture.
That structure means the same underlying data gets assembled independently, by different people, for different outputs, from different sources. A federal housing grant needs current housing stock, affordability burden, income distribution and population projections. The planner needs the same housing data for the community plan update. Finance needs the same income figures for the budget presentation. Each one builds its own version from scratch.
The figures in a grant application and the figures in a council report should match. Produced months apart by different staff starting from different sources, they often don’t. And the problem compounds when a grant deadline lands alongside a council briefing, because both draw on the same thin evidence base at the same time.
The approach
Stonewall brought administration, planning, public works and communications onto Studio together, as a shared data layer rather than a tool for a single function.
Whoever owns the grant file pulls a full economic report straight from Studio for a federal application, without routing a data request through the planner first. The planner pulls housing data for the community plan update from the same source. Communications exports a chart for the council presentation and refreshes the website from the same content.
Each department gets what it needs, in the format it needs, without asking another department to assemble it first.
The result
Four departments in a town of 5,000 now work from one evidence base. The figures match because they come from the same place, the sourcing is traceable because Studio maintains it, and administration has nothing to reconcile across departments.
The gain isn’t only speed. A grant deadline that lands in the same week as a council briefing no longer puts two departments in competition for the same data, because neither has to build it.
A town of 5,000 now answers a councilor the way a city with a research department would, because four departments stopped keeping four versions of the truth.