City of Lahti, Finland – Governmental Diary Management System
Background
City of Lahti in Finland is one of the major business cities in the country. The officials from different sectors work closely together in major issues and needed to have an online access to accurate information in they every day work environments. For this purpose they hade created an intranet solution where all the necessary information was at hand. But the difficulty in using this service was soon realized due to the fact the most of the officials who needed the latest information traveled a lot and where not able to access the intranet. Therefore the city decided to mobilize parts of the intranet to better serve the officials need.
The necessary information need was identified as follows:
- City officials need the be able to access their own personal information management system (PIM) including their e-mails
- Official decisions database needs to be at hand to all the necessary officials
- The board meeting agendas have to be accessible where ever the officials are
Solution
Parts of the intranet was mobilized with Sofor’s Waplane Query Edit tool. In early stage the decision was made that the following applications should be mobilized: board meeting agendas database, official decisions database, calendars, e-mail and other PIM functions. One of the key functions in this mobilization was also the added search function.
The backend solution was IBM/Lotus Domino and Sofor worked as a system integrator in the mobilization case. In governmental cases the need to be able to localize the service and the ability to use various different devices is essential. This was one of the major reasons that the city decided to use Waplane solution: the Waplane technology has automated localizations/language support as well as dynamic terminal adaptation.
Benefits
Today the city officials are able to access the necessary data and information storages online at any time, anywhere with any device with a browser. This saves both money and time. And as the service is a hosted solution, there is no extra work for the city’s IT division due to the fact that the updates and servers are fully hosted.
Technology
The mobile service is hosted by Net Servant Oy, a subsidiary of Sofor Oy. As normally in governmental cases the existing back-office systems run in-house at city IT center.