Case Study

SharePoint, the foundation for the City information management and citizens relationship

Abstract

Country/Region: Lleida (Spain)Industry: Local Government

Customer profile: The City of Lleida brings services to approximately 140.000 people with a team of more than 1.300 employees.

SituationThey needed to increase the agility and efficiency of their internal and external information management and citizen relationship processes.

Proposed solutionThis document introduces to the practical application of the collaboration platform for the management of Urban Planning and Environment Areas: Professional appointment

management Electrical switchboards control Container inventory/issues.

Benefits Efficiency and agility for both the

internal and external information management

Efficient workflows with the citizens and collaboration with the external services companies.

"The intelligent city, the City 2.0 must be based on innovation and knowledge, and this means new ways of working, collaborating and participating. This is necessary that information flows, moves and is shared”.

An intelligent knowledge management allows us to increase our efficiency and our capacity to generate value, this brings us a competitive advantage and defines the path for the modernization of both the cities and their environment and the public sector.

Angel Ros Alcalde de Lleida

The City of Lleida, through its Instituto Municipal de Informática (IMI), bet on Microsoft as its strategic partner for the management of all their data and workflows in their collaborative departmental environments.

Their SharePoint collaboration platform is the foundation of the

different internal and cross-department workspaces that IMI

implemented to ease the management, exchange, access and work

with all the data managed by the city areas and departments, as well

as to share the information with the citizens and external services

companies, making the workflows more agile and improving the

services offered to the community.

Situation

Public administrations are facing for a long time now, the challenge of improve the efficiency of the services offered to the citizens and business, while they have to implement important improvement initiatives for their internal processes.

Cities are the closest public administration to the people, the direct and first point of contact for the citizen and this means their services must be offered in a simple, intuitive, easy and agile way, mostly leveraging the Information and Communications Technologies (ICT).

At the same time, they face the challenge of improving their working processes (which corresponds to over 1.500 different activities), all of them related to the information and knowledge management.

Many of these processes fall into the “unstructured” category, so their management goes beyond the traditional ERPs and require collaboration and communication tools able to accomplish this management in a fast, flexible but intuitive way for all the professionals in the organization.

Some years ago, the City of Lleida chose Microsoft and their technologies as strategic partner for this area.

Using the Microsoft collaboration solutions, the Instituto Municipal de Informática (IMI) has implemented a whole set of internal and cross-department workspaces to ease the management, exchange, access and work with all the data managed from the city areas and departments.

They needed to manage and integrate external and internal workflows and diverse management solutions, such as the Geographical Information Systems, so they required an open platform and agile enough to quickly implement all these processes.

Constant changes into the process, information types and involved agents also required them to work with tools able to

deliver this level of flexibility and minimize the organizational change for the employees that use these tools.

As Antoni Saldaña –CEO of the IMI- explains, “We needed to have a ‘sustainable’ tool to support our maintenance and evolution, one that allows us to manage all unstructured information, easy to integrate with other applications and intuitive for the final users”.

Solution

The City Employee Portal and collaboration intranet have become in a single access point for all the information used by the employees, which offers customized workspaces for each department and area as well as access to their administrative management solutions.

In this portal, the City employees can access and use different “general” collaborative environments such as “press”, “image management” and “human resources” as well as customized workspaces for each department’s activities and processes.

Three examples of these collaborative environments are the “Professional appointment management”, the “Electrical switchboards of Lleida” and “Container management”, which belong to the Urban Planning and Environment departments.

Professional’s appointments management

From a web environment available to city employees and citizens, an application records the job appointment requests for the technicians and managers of the Urban Planning Department activities, works, urban discipline and activities discipline areas, in order to answer questions and handle related technical and management processes.

All that appointment requests are automatically stored into the collaboration environment of the OMAC (the City Public Service Office), which, depending on the area the appointment is requested, redirects it to each department manager. They can then assign the appointments to the corresponding professionals and technicians.

Once a technician receives a request via an automatic workflow that runs on the portal, he or she sets the date and time for an appointment and gathers all the information and

Different views of the container inventory and issue management solution

“The key asset of a city is the knowledge and innovation capability of its citizens and businesses. For a local administration, its key asset is the knowledge and innovation and service capabilities of the public employees. Tools are required to capitalize on all this knowledge, document it, structure it and finally, share it”.

Montse Mínguez García3ª Deputy Major and New Technology and

Technology Park Councilor

“Microsoft SharePoint is a sustainable tool, its deployment is seamless and our final users see it as an evolution of their productivity environment, with a minimal impact in the operation and implementation costs. It does not require to dedicate an excessive amount of human resources and delivers on the commitment of “reach where you want to reach”

Antoni Saldaña LapeñaCEO, Instituto Municipal

de Informática

documentation needed for the meeting. This process ends with an electronic email sent to the requester containing all this data.

In some cases, the request can be addressed directly by phone or email avoiding the citizen to move to the city offices.

The whole process is traceable; the information is stored with a log of the services delivered, and all its related information, into the appointment record.

During the first seven months of activity of this solution, it has driven more than 450 requests.

Electrical switchboards management

The deployed solution –for the Urban Planning Department as well- automatically records in the city platform all the issues detected in more than 300 electrical switchboards spread over the city at the public lighting level.

This information is detected by diverse sensors installed into the equipment (the switchboard), and it is sent to the management application where it is available to the city technicians and they can act upon it.

All these switchboard data (technical, descriptive and geographical positioning) is stored in a collaborative environment of the intranet, where it can be queried using the public web site of the City.

Container inventory and issues management

Through a Microsoft SharePoint-based portal, the IMI designed and implemented a collaboration environment for the Environmental Department to manage all the information related to the containers distributed through the city.

Through this workspace, the City handles all the information related to every single container, including its technical details (capacity, typology) and its physical location in the land.

All this technical and location data is handled directly by the administrative technicians of the Department from inside the workspace without requiring them to have special skills on the usage of GIS tools or positioning information.

The information is integrated with the City Geographical Information System (GIS) and it is displayed directly over the city map with the ability to overlap different maps to obtain richer information about every point of interest.

The container-related information is managed with the option to maintain different versions, so they have a log of records and changes for every element.

The information is available for the City employees and the professionals of the external company that is in charge of the maintenance of the city containers.

Benefits

The implementation of these different collaborative environments for the departments, both general and specific for each area, have delivered significant improvements in terms of information storage, management and processing.

The replacement of the file servers, shared folders and emails by an intranet with full-featured document and information search and management capabilities, has provided significant agility improvements for the internal processes and for the relationships with the citizens and external services providers as well.

For example, the centralized management of calendars for departments, professionals, activities and city equipment has helped them to increase transparency of the availability information and avoid conflicts between agendas with a real time visibility of this information.

Professional appointments

The solution implemented by the IMI to manage the professional appointments provides clear benefits, not only for the citizens but for the professionals of the Administration as well, resulting in a more agile and easy interaction between and a reduction in the number of visits of the users to the City offices.

The OMAC redirects each request to its corresponding area or department, bringing a quicker and easier access to the service for the users without having to know how is the internal organization of the Public Administration to contact the professionals that must respond to their questions, thus resulting in a better service.

The automatic process of the information flow and access and management of all the data reduces the time required to handle these requests and activities.

The system traceability allows them to have a log of all the questions and request categorized by typology, and all the related process (response time, etc.).This information allows them to build, in one hand, various dashboards and panels to manage and analyze this information and, in the other hand, it boosts the knowledge management mechanisms inside each area and department and across departments them as well.

Search and query capabilities delivered by the solution allows the users to find and access all the appointments and requests serviced or in process, in a flexible and agile manner.

Finally, the version management capability allows them to known, for every appointment, the record of changes made, information that was not previously centralized.

Electrical switchboard management

The management of all technical and descriptive data for every switchboard (311 ones, distributed among the city) together with the location information in a visual manner, makes easier the record management and updating tasks without requiring the user to have any kind of knowledge geographical information systems. This improves the agility of the whole process.

Having this information centralized and updated in real time has allowed them to develop some specialized dashboards that significantly improve the control and monitoring of these assets and the decision making.

Different views of the electrical switchboard management solution

Appointment Management application

City containers inventory and issue management

Similar to the electrical switchboards, the management of their installed base of containers (almost 3.000 spread over the city) from a single collaboration environment where the technical information is stored together with their location information has made the maintenance and query processes more simple and agile.

The ability, for each container, to introduce the location information, or access it using its postal address reduces the likelihood of mistaken addresses and it allows the user to update such information visually using simply “drag and drop” functions in their user interface.

Having this information centralized into the City datacenter and available for the subcontracted external company allows the Administration to actually keep this information under control, which addresses the previous situation where this information was only available by the external company.

The version control system brings them the ability of trace all the changes made into the records and data inside them. Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 is the process and business collaboration platform for the business and the Internet.

If you want more information about Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010, please visit the web:www.microsoft.com/sharepoint

For more information

For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers in the United States and Canada who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to: www.microsoft.es and www.microsoft.cat

If you want more information about the City of Lleida and the Instituto Municipal de Informática (IM) products and services, please call the (34) 973 700 417 or visit the web www.paeria.es

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Document published April, 01 2011

Microsoft Products and Technologies

Microsoft® Windows®

Microsoft Office 2010 Microsoft Windows Server−Windows Server 2008 R2 TM

− Exchange Server−Office SharePoint TM Portal Server

Standard Edition− SQL Server 2008