The Catholic Centre for Immigrants (CCI) is a forward-thinking organization and one of the largest settlement agencies in Ottawa. Every year, their dedicated staff supports thousands of clients across a wide range of essential programs, helping newcomers build sustainable, thriving lives in their new community.
Growing Pains in a Digital World
Like many successful organizations that have experienced rapid growth, CCI found that their internal systems hadn’t quite kept pace with their expanding mission. While they had various digital tools in place, different teams were using them in entirely different ways. Institutional knowledge was often siloed, and day-to-day operations in some programs still relied heavily on manual, paper-based processes. This lack of a unified digital structure was causing unnecessary friction, making it harder for staff to collaborate and draining time that could have been spent supporting clients.
CCI leadership understood that to sustainably scale their impact, they needed to bridge these operational gaps and empower their staff with an organized, cohesive digital environment.
Listening First, Building Second
Our partnership with CCI didn’t start with a generic technology roadmap; it started with listening. We spent time understanding how their different departments actually worked, where the daily frustrations lay, and what the staff genuinely needed from their tools to feel supported.
Armed with those insights, we rolled out a deeply customized, phased digital transformation.
- Building the Foundation: We began with an initial initiative to create a unified workspace. We restructured Microsoft Teams to act as a centralized collaboration hub, migrated their scattered files into a secure SharePoint and OneDrive environment, and established clear governance rules.
- Digitizing Daily Life: In our second phase, we focused on replacing tedious paper processes with intuitive digital workflows. We introduced mobile Surface tablet workflows to optimize intake with highly searchable digital shift logs using Microsoft Planner.
- Putting Knowledge at Their Fingertips: To completely eliminate the frustration of hunting for information, we configured Microsoft Copilot Studio to securely ingest CCI’s standard operating procedures and policies. This allowed us to deploy a custom Copilot agent directly within Teams that delivers instant, accurate answers to operational questions based entirely on approved documentation while respecting security groups and file access permissions.
- Empowering the Team: We knew the technology would only succeed if the staff felt confident using it. We delivered interactive, hands-on workshops tailored to their specific pain points, shifting away from broad concepts to focus strictly on practical tool mastery.
The Brighter Outcomes
Today, CCI operates with a renewed sense of agility and organizational clarity. By designing solutions around the reality of their daily routines, we helped them build a sustainable digital ecosystem that naturally fosters teamwork.
- Sustainably Evolving Knowledgebase: Staff now have instant access to reliable answers through their custom AI agent, which significantly reduces frustration and frees up the IT support team to focus on strategic improvements. Security was tightly woven into this process, ensuring sensitive HR and Finance data is never surfaced to unauthorized staff.
- Staff Cohesion & Confidence: Through targeted training, the team developed clearer shared practices and a much higher level of comfort with their day-to-day tools. They are now fully equipped to securely manage file permissions, instantly convert meeting notes into actionable tasks, and automate meeting agendas.
- Reclaimed Capacity: By standardizing their collaboration framework across departments, and digitizing cumbersome paper workflows, staff can accomplish more with less administrative friction
- A Roadmap Rooted in Reality: Instead of an overwhelming, overnight change, CCI benefited from an ongoing, phased engagement that adapted naturally as the organization built its digital capacity and confidence.