City of Gothenberg
Company: LINQCustomer: City of GothenbergSubmitted by: jd marketingThe City of Gothenberg in Sweden can report both productivity and process improvements through their partnership with LINQ.
With 35,000 employees, an annual budget of £3 billion and 35 companies to run in addition to providing key local services, the City of Gothenberg now delivers greater efficiency to its residents. LINQ, the Swedish software and Services Company, has worked with the City of Gothenberg to facilitate these improvements through the provision of a Corporate Portal. This portal gives 10,000 knowledge workers throughout the city a single, yet personalised, point of access to the information they require for their daily tasks.Sven-Christer Öhman the CIO of the City explains the initial vision that started the project, “The City had a goal to do things faster, to use less resource and to achieve better quality results. We believed that we could achieve this by providing the technology and creating the culture to enable better collaboration to take place between groups.
As much as 70% of an organisation’s information resides inside the heads of individuals. Our mission was to make more of this resource available to the City and to recycle as much of this valuable asset as possible. We are well on our way to achieving this goal”.With companies as diverse as a Harbor Company, an Energy Distribution Company and a Construction Company, the City of Gothenberg has to be an extremely commercially aware operation. They also have to provide the core services such as Health; Education and Housing their residents deserve.
Sven-Christer Öhman outlines some of the benefits they have experienced through their partnership with LINQ. ” With 10,000 knowledge workers using the same mechanism to access the specific information relevant to their role, we have simplified and lowered the cost of ownership of our key information systems. We have also shortened our budgeting cycle by 50% and each knowledge worker has improved their productivity by 25%.”So how have the City of Gothenberg achieved these results? Using a framework of Lotus Notes, the LINQ Portal provides a single interface that each user can personalise and gives access to the services within the Portal they need such as Business Intelligence, Archives of correspondence or e-business information. The City of Gothenberg has created a Knowledge Economy by using the workspaces created by LINQ.
These workspaces have become the place where teams can share information, manage projects, make comments on work in progress or ask for input from outside project teams mining the expertise within the City.Sven-Christer Öhman explains, “most products that manage workflow for example, only work from the perspective of the individual and can give a very narrow view of their contribution to a project. What LINQ have designed and implemented is completely different in emphasis. Their workspaces come from an understanding that to work as a team, the workspace must be designed to enable the whole group to work together not individual piece by individual piece. It is this improved ability to work together that has made us more effective.”This has been a cultural change for the knowledge workers but is now completely accepted as the only way of working.
Sven-Christer Öhman comments, “The only way to gain complete acceptance was to ensure that right from the beginning of the project, the most senior executives accepted that they would function every day just like their staff. Managers worked with their staff in the initial stages to encourage the use of the Portal and once everyone was using the facilities they were hooked.”The City of Gothenberg chose LINQ rather than build a Portal themselves or select other consultancies for two reasons. The first was their ability to work with The Board of the City and convince them of the effect the project would have and the second was their unique approach to the provision of collaborative workspaces.Within the portal there is a range of services and what each person uses varies enormously. For example someone within the Finance Department of one of the companies may only use two services on a regular basis so their desktop will only show those they have requested.
If their role changes or they need additional information or perhaps join project groups, they can change the approved services they access with no IT intervention. Again Sven-Christer Öhman explains, “As CIO I may have up to 25 services on my desktop. I could not possibly keep a detailed track of everything that happens within all of these areas on a daily basis. Through the Portal I can immediately see what has changed in each service or project and receive business intelligence alerts defined by my personal areas of interest. This mixture of both information push and pull allows great pro activity and agility of decision making”.
Now accepted within The City as the workplace for all work, the next step is to both extend the available services and also to make the portal available to up to another 5,000 knowledge workers. Alongside this development is the idea of opening up The Portal in a useful way to the citizens of the City to allow anything from taking out a library book, to communicating with your child’s school to taking up e-business services.”Many of the organisations we are currently in discussion with are aiming for the corporate benefits that have been achieved through our close partnership with City of Gothenberg. We are also delighted with the excitement our unique expertise in providing mobile access to a portal solution is generating. We are looking forward to our continued involvement in the development and extension of the City’s Portal application, ” Michael Mandal CEO Linq.
