Hollands Kroon uses the power of the cloud to reimagine government
At Sparked, we work hard to understand our clients’ unique situations and needs, and then we develop customized strategies and identify the best set of software solutions to help them meet those needs. One of the most exciting projects we’ve worked on in recent years was with the municipality of Hollands Kroon in the Netherlands, which moved its IT infrastructure entirely to the cloud to transform its operations, engage citizens, and empower employees to do their best work whenever, wherever, and however they want.
In 2012, Hollands Kroon embarked on a three-part plan to completely reimagine the way the city does business. The first part was a total reorganization of staff structure from a standard top-down hierarchy to self-governing teams, with a focus on outcomes—which meant moving away from micromanaging processes and procedures and instead empowering specialized teams to make the best decisions for their divisions. The second part was to redefine municipal IT from a self-managed datacenter model to a hybrid public/private cloud model. Lastly, the third part will be to find better ways to utilize the city’s digital data and improve how the city collaborates with citizens.
To reach its goals, the city wanted to find effective methods to bring up-to-date, best-in-class technology to civilians and civil servants. We determined that the cloud was the most direct way to get there—it’s easy to get started on and affordable yet powerful. The new self-supporting teams at Hollands Kroon now have a fully modernized workplace where they can bring their own devices to work, and take advantage of leading-edge communication and collaboration tools. The second goal was to make the entire IT ecosystem more flexible and agile by making it easy to test new applications and to scale new services up and down. The cloud infrastructure allows for this sort of quick response, so we can add and remove resources on demand, quickly turn applications on and off, and experiment much more easily. The enterprise as a whole becomes significantly more agile, so the city’s IT professionals can focus on business needs rather than day-to-day system management.
When it came time to choose a cloud provider, we felt that Microsoft had the strongest offering available and we appreciated that it had built a datacenter in Hollands Kroon. Arthur Cremers, the Director at Hollands Kroon, had the opportunity to visit the datacenter before it was completed and locked down, and he said that the level of physical security was truly impressive. Microsoft also offers a superior set of cloud services, including Office 365, and it has demonstrated an impressive commitment to a cloud-first philosophy and multiplatform support for users.
At this time, the Hollands Kroon IT ecosystem is completely cloud-based, with both the workplace and the datacenter running in the cloud. The final phase of the three-part digital adventure is just beginning, and we think it’s going to bring great dividends for the city. Now that all of the information is in one big hybrid cloud, we are going to use advanced analytical tools like Microsoft Azure Machine Learning, Azure Data Lake, and Microsoft R Server to pull high-end business analytics and actionable insights from the city’s data. We’ve used those tools to develop a solution we call Oxygen—it’s an advanced analytics framework for which Hollands Kroon is our first public customer. It will enable enhanced decision making that will turn Hollands Kroon into an even smarter city that maximizes the efficiency of its municipal budget and provides citizens with comprehensive, superior services delivered in ways that they can access anytime, anywhere, and from any digital device. With the power of the Microsoft cloud as its foundation, Hollands Kroon is leading the way for local governments who want to transform their IT ecosystems to be more agile, manageable, and effective, and better serve employees and citizens.
For more information about the digital transformation in Hollands Kroon, please read the full case study here.
About Sparked
Achieving your business goals faster by making the most of technology: that’s where Sparked comes in. With fresh ideas and tailored cloud services, we transform businesses. The result? Smart organizations in which people have more time to focus on what’s really important. Read more on http://www.sparked.nl/.
Today’s post was written by Dave Kiwi, Founder and Chief Operations Officer at Sparked, a Microsoft CityNext Partner and 2015 Microsoft Innovator of the Year.
