For our Digital Transformation Project we have examined the City of Rotterdam’s ERP system run by the city’s IT branch (around 1,000 employees). The department focuses on serving all 11,000 employees aiming to securely provide them with the best possible IT solutions to help them be most effective and precise at their jobs. Between 2000 and 2005, the CoR introduced the Oracle e-Business Suite as their ERP system on desktop. However, this package of applications and especially its user interface (UI) and accessibility (via VPN) now performs rather poorly on user experience (UX). Consequently, the City of Rotterdam IT has started to search for solutions to enhance usability and accessibility of eBS applications. The most viable appears to be to start offering some of the services on smartphones.
Without the latest mobile technology employees had to launch a VPN client on their laptop, enter a soft token key and then a password in order to connect to the on premise business applications marked in blue. Offering certain services on mobile phones would eliminate most of this trouble and can be realized as seen on the diagram.
Starting on the smartphone, a so-called MDX toolkit enables the City of Rotterdam to wrap any native mobile app so that it can be controlled by a mobile device management installed on an employee’s device. The mobile device management opens a MicroVPN that is invisible to the user and securely sends and receives information via the internet. This traffic is received by XenMobile’s NetScaler which handles load balancing and securely forwards it into the secure zone where it is then received by the actual XenMobile Server for final decryption. As the server is already in the secure zone it can safely forward the information to the Oracle eBS server and therefore finalize the transaction.
CoR IT has seen a shift as of late, whereby the role of their IT department is changing. Technical knowledge seems to lose importance and focus goes out to successfully extracting knowledge and translating it into supportive advice and design. While its core responsibility is still to deliver stable, secure services, the department is in transition to become more innovative and proactive. Please view our DTP video & report for details.
All in all, the implementation of mobile technology represents a true transformative shift in the way the IT branch serves its customer, for their customers but also for the branch itself.
Extending their service portfolio by offering agile, mobile working is an entire new service, and will change the future of all the services that the branch provides. Next to the obvious increases in availability and accessibility, the launch of mobile technology is the branch’s first true step towards an information strategy with an implemented Monitoring & Evaluation system to perform process mining. They can start to worry less operationally, and focus more on collecting & analysing data to start reacting proactively towards their customers.
Group 14
Authors: Dan Acristinii, Josine Jin Snoep, Beatrice Testori, Jonathan von Rueden
