S U C C E S S S T O R Y

E N T E R P R I S E I N F O R M A T I O N M A N A G E M E N T

INDUSTRY

Public Sector

CUSTOMER

COMM-UNITY EDV GmbH

CHALLENGES

• Media discontinuity between data and unstructured information made the digitization of processes in municipalities more difficult.

• Complexity, scope, and type of tasks are similar, regardless of the size of the Austrian cities and municipalities.

• e-government laws, structural reforms, and changes to budgetary law imposed extensive demands on the small cities and municipalities in Austria.

SOLUTIONS

• OpenText Extended ECM for SAP® Solutions

• OpenText Enterprise Scan

BENEFITS

• Seamless integration of unstructured information in GeOrg with OpenText does away with media discontinuity for true e-government.

• GeOrg usage model on a rental basis is attractive to municipalities with small numbers of users.

• Integration with SAP and sophisticated authorization models ensure GeOrg is legally compliant–now and in future.

Empress Maria Theresa would be delighted: Austrian municipalities benefit from e-government in the cloudTasks and processes are the same for cities and municipalities, regardless of their size, and require a powerful but low-cost software solution

Austria is a country of small and medium-sized municipalities with few cities in the Alpine republic having 50,000 inhabitants or more. Regardless of the size of the population and the number of municipal employees, though, the tasks of municipalities and their under-takings are the same, in principle. Whether it’s budgeting and material management, real estate management and maintenance, tax and revenue administration, or administration of the construction records – there are complex tasks that every municipality faces that can only be mapped digitally according to legislators. However, smaller municipalities often lack the expertise and capital to be able to implement and operate the necessary software for this. With the “municipal organizer” (GeOrg) based on OpenText software, there is now a solution available as a pure software service from the cloud that will be used by more than 50 municipalities in Austria by the end of 2014.

“Electronic Act”: Solid legal framework for real e-government“There is a long tradition of systematic file management in Austria, dating back to the intro-duction of the administrative law for the imperial-royal administration of Maria Theresa between 1750 and 1753,” explains Michael Stark, Managing Director of COMM-UNITY EDV GmbH and project manager for GeOrg. “This experience has also influenced legal norms in recent years and has led to one of the most modern e-government legislations in Europe: the “elektronischer Akt” (Electronic Act), or ELAK for short, which was technically

Around 670 of approx. 2,350 communities in Austria use the solutions of COMM-UNITY GmbH and its 73 employees. The provider of software products and services for municipal authorities is one of Austria’s leading developers for innovative, tailored, and efficient e-government solutions. The company’s latest coup is the “GemeindeOrganisator” (municipal organizer). GeOrg is a preconfigured platform that consists of the SAP® industry solution for the public sector, along with OpenText Extended ECM for SAP® Solutions. Municipalities can obtain all of the functions that they require for administration of authorities and municipal undertakings as a software service from the cloud.

www.opentext.com • sales@opentext.com • 800 499 6544

S U C C E S S S T O R Y

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translated and put into an interface definition in 2004. Since then, Austria has created the legal framework to make all administrative procedures 100 percent digital and map them on a solid legal foundation, from scanning of documents, to digital signature all the way through to electronic dispatch to citizens and companies.

Along with OpenText, GeOrg does away with media discontinuity in municipal authoritiesIf paper stops being used as an information medium, an electronic equivalent must be available that offers forgery-proof storage and provision at the touch of a button, in the correct context, and without media discontinuity of not only data but also all unstructured content, such as news, letters, e-mails, notices, forms, etc. A solution of this kind would also address security concerns so that only authorized persons may access and edit the respective file contents and infor-mation. “Due to these requirements, it was clear that we would work with our long-term supplier, OpenText,” stresses Michael Stark. “As ELAK represents the core of GeOrg, we already decided in 2010 to create the municipal organizer with SAP and with OpenText Extended ECM for SAP® Solutions as the second main pillar. With this, the municipalities in Austria can design and carry out all administrative tasks through to communication with citizens and companies fully digitally. Empress Maria Theresa would certainly be impressed if she saw what has become of her reforms.”

Purchase or rent for 40 years: OpenText supports an attractive pricing model

“From the outset, our idea for the deployment program has been ‘rent rather than purchase,’” says Michael Stark. “However, for this purpose we required solutions that were implemented centrally and could be used locally via a web browser. In addition, it had to be possible to map the many different legal units, the municipalities, and their sometimes cross-municipality undertakings flexibly and in a legally compliant way.” The following example proves that this was successful: To create an equally comprehensive and municipality-specific solution would cost a municipality at least 20,000 hours or EUR 2 million. In contrast, a town/city with 50,000 inhabitants and

“With OpenText, hundreds or even thousands of legal units can make use of a single platform for mapping and operation completely separately from one another. On this basis, we were able to develop a rental model with which even the smallest municipalities can benefit from the world-class solutions of the two strategic partners, OpenText and SAP.”

MICHAEL STARK QUALIFIED ENGINEER AND MANAGING DIRECTOR OF COMM-UNITY EDV GMBH

120 municipal employees pays around EUR 3,800 per month for the rental model. For the same financial outlay, they can use GeOrg for nearly 40 years. “With OpenText, hundreds or even thousands of legal units can make use of a single platform for mapping and operation completely separately from one another. On this basis, we were able to launch a rental model with which even the smallest municipalities can benefit from world-class solutions of two strategic partners, OpenText and SAP,” emphasizes Michael Stark.

Legally compliant: GeOrg and OpenText can now perform double-entry accounting and structural reformBased on the Austrian budgetary law reform at national level, the revised version of the Austrian Regulation on Public Accounts (Voranschlags- und Rechnungsabschlussverordnung (VRV new)) stipulates the introduction of an integrated income statement, cash-flow statement, and balance sheet in municipalities as well. The VRV is to apply from January 1, 2018 and unites the advantages of single-entry and double-entry bookkeeping. “Without the pairing of SAP and OpenText software as the basis for GeOrg, such a drastic change would hardly have been possible,” explains Michael Stark, before continuing: “It is precisely here that the strength of the comprehensive approach for GeOrg can be seen: All data, information, and processes are digitized, while migration and project management tools are also provided, and everything can be used in the rental model. This provides Austrian municipalities of all sizes today with the legal security of tomorrow.” This naturally also applies to the structural reform of the state of Styria, which plans to merge its 539 municipalities into 289 as of January 1, 2015. While GeOrg supports the merger of municipalities through collaboration on the basis of OpenText, among other ways, everything will remain as before on the cost side. This is because the rental model is exclusively oriented towards the number of inhabitants. “Against this background, and factoring in cost transparency and legal security, we expect that in the next two to three years, all of our 670 previous customers will use GeOrg,” assures Michael Stark.