Wigo4it: how a public-sector organization is modernizing critical services with cloud technology

“Many think that moving to the cloud just means getting rid of the data center. But it’s really so much more than that. It’s a complete transformation – different platform, different infrastructure, different mindset, different way of working.”

Pascal Greuter, ad interim Director of Operations at Wigo4it, is describing his company’s ongoing shift to the cloud and the extraordinary impact this is having on the society it serves. 

“Our work revolves around providing social security to those qualifying for social welfare benefits,” he says. “Through our IT system and services, we bring vital support to citizens and households across some of The Netherlands’ most populated cities.”

It’s a mission that Wigo4it strives to promote using the latest technology available. One that recently culminated in an organization-wide program of cloud adoption and digital transformation that continues to this day. 

Dubbed ‘better, faster, cheaper,’ the initiative is helping Wigo4it to automate processes, bring more value in less time and improve efficiency. Ultimately bringing better, more effective support to the members of society who require it the most.

“What I love about this initiative is that it’s all about giving time back to our civil servants,” he says. 

“Time to focus on the complex tasks of their work; time not spent on admin; time to help the most vulnerable, most in-need parts of our society.”

External pressures lead to a new opportunity

Founded in 2007, Wigo4it was jointly created by the cities of The Hague, Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Utrecht with the aim of promoting knowledge-sharing and efficiency in the realm of IT solutions. 

“The idea behind Wigo4it is that the four municipalities tend to face common challenges and have similar requirements when it comes to technology,” explains Rene van Osnabrugge, ad interim CTO at Wigo4it and DevOps consultant at Xpirit, a Microsoft partner that supported Wigo4it’s digital transformation. “That’s why fifteen years ago, they decided to join their forces and create the IT system Socrates.”

Nearly two decades later, Socrates is now one of the top three IT systems in the Netherlands, providing benefits to 144,000 vulnerable citizens – which equals nearly a third of all welfare recipients in The Netherlands. It currently handles more than €1.8bn per year and a network of 7,500 system users.

An organization in constant evolution and expansion, Wigo4it reached a turning point in 2019, when the four municipalities approached them with fresh new demands. 

“They asked us to substantially reduce our budget and cut costs in four years,” he says. “Based on research, they decided that more could be done to improve the quality of our IT code and make our solution more future proof. 

“Driven by our own ambitions to become a more professional and modern organization, we needed to deliver more value for money and become more product-focused – rather than just a shared service center extension of the municipalities’ IT departments.” 

Embracing Microsoft and the cloud

As they searched for a solution that would best fit their needs, Wigo4it knew the importance of delivering high-quality services available to everyone. “We have an enormous responsibility to deliver flawless welfare payments,” says Pascal Greuter. “Even the smallest mistake has the potential to attract negative media exposure and impact our services.”

With public sector organizations increasingly replacing their on-premises data centers with cloud-based alternatives, Wigo4it saw this as the ideal opportunity to follow a similar path.

“We envisioned the cloud as much more than just a means to cut down budget,” says Rene van Osnabrugge. “It was the perfect way to automate our operations, become more secure and predictable, and ultimately more efficient.” 

“And Microsoft Azure offered us great performance increases at a great price.”

That was the start of a partnership that Dian van Heijningen, PO at Wigo4it’s Cloud Enablement team, says has been crucial to the success of the project. 

“Microsoft gave us some incredible support from the early days of our collaboration,” he says. “Not only did they help us get proficient on key products – such as Networking, Sentinel, Identity Governance, Monitoring & Alerting – they were also very fast and professional in addressing all our queries.”

He highlights how their collaboration quickly evolved from traditional vendor-user to a more dynamic partnership aimed at mutual support. “We would sometimes come up with questions or ideas that Microsoft had not yet thought about,” he says. “This is how we worked together to overcome challenges along the entire way.”

A monumental transition  

Over the past three years, Wigo4it and Xpirit have been creating a new cloud environment, running on Azure Kubernetes Services, to replace the data center. They are currently focusing on the next phase of the project, which entails re-building a host of Socrates applications in the new environment. 

Alongside this, the company is also moving towards a Software-as-a-Service environment that’s allowing them to use Office 365 and Azure Virtual Desktop in the workplace. 

“One of the fundamental things that we want to put in place is self-service,” explains van Osnabrugge.

“Previous to our digital transformation, every single request around use and development of applications would be sent to us – from all four municipalities. That meant a lot of manual handling and, as a result, time and money. 

“In this new environment, we want to transform that part of our work into a self-service portal where individual employees are responsible for their own requests.”

On top of that, Xpirit is also helping Wigo4it to build a compliancy dashboard that will soon allow teams to have access and insights into their operations and reduce manual checks.  

Finally, a second self-service portal is also currently in the pipeline. This is going to be destined for the end customers and will be aimed at automating various functionalities. 

Building a DevOps culture

Migrating to the cloud isn’t just a matter of budget management for Wigo4it. By embracing a new, more agile approach, the organization is promoting a DevOps culture aimed at encouraging employees to take greater ownership of their work. 

“Prior to our shift, we were a very siloed organization when it came to our working culture,” says Pascal Greuter. “We needed to ask permission before doing anything.

“But since then, we’ve been persuading our employees to take more responsibility when it comes to innovation.”

He says that switching to the cloud was crucial in triggering that cultural shift. “Moving to a new testing environment – one that allows us to try out new features and develop software on top of them – has been transformational for us,” he continues. 

“And cloud infrastructure makes that possible, freeing us of hardware and giving us the power to innovate.”

It’s a sentiment that Wigo4it wants to communicate across all branches of its operations – especially with the self-service portal becoming available. 

“We are building this portal in a way that allows municipalities to develop more functionalities on top of it,” he explains. “All without depending on us.” 

Creating the blueprint for more, greater benefits   

Having now completed the bulk of the work, Wigo4it is looking at the future.

“When all of this began, the goal was to be better, faster and cheaper,” says Greuter. 

“This is something we’ve already started to see: being on the cloud gives us insights on our costs, makes us flexible and scalable, and it is working as an accelerator for innovation across the entire organization.”

Now Wigo4it hopes to extend its services beyond the four municipalities – and branching out to other locations in the Netherlands. “One of my greatest frustrations is that we are offering our solutions to only four cities in the Netherlands,” he concludes. 

“There are some 350 municipalities that we can provide this solution to, and we hope that in the future, many will want to join in. 

“Ultimately embracing that company-wide transformation that being on the cloud empowers you to achieve.”