Baerum Kommune Success Story

Using Intalio|BPMS, Bærum Kommune gives community 24x7 access to government services and also provides faster turnaround of services to its residents.

Customer: Bærum Kommune Industry: Government Product: Intalio|BPMS Application:Provide public services over the internet

Customer Profile

Bærum Kommune is one of the biggest municipalities in Norway that provides its residents various services such as day care, schools, garbage collection and recycling, healthcare, and employment. The municipality employs more than 10,000 people to address the needs of 114,000 local residents. Bærum has the highest per capita income in Norway and the highest proportion of university-educated individuals.

Business Problem

Efficiency of public services

Public sector in Norway decided to explore alternative customer channels to its public services. Internet technologies served as an option for around the clock availability of public services and to ensure quality of these services. Bærum Kommune planned to introduce a new solution for its residents to register and upload forms for all public services via the Internet. The goal was to guarantee a positive user experience by replacing paper-based forms with an effective and responsive GUI web application that enables dialogue between citizens and public services. To reduce the unnecessary administration overhead, to increase quality and efficiency of the municipality’s public services the municipality desired to develop a fast and highly precise automated case handling process.

Intalio Solution

A BPM centric organization

The overall target of continuous improvement of the public services required re-engineering of the processes for the delivery of those services. As a first step, the municipality selected services associated with the public school system such as registering for first class and after school care programs. Since the municipality serves several hundred services through automated user communication, they have an ongoing process of developing new services and updating existing services as per new requirements.

Every service now demands authentication through “ID-porten”, a secure Norwegian national authentication solution for all Norwegian citizens. Using this solution where every user is authenticated allows municipality to retrieve all the available information of the user that is relevant to the specific service requested. This design improves data quality and consistency among different systems used by the municipality. In addition, the user can avoid entering the same information such as name and address every time they request a service. For services associated with the public school system, the parents can access information such as which schools their children attend or how many days each of their children attend the after school care program.

The current process is analyzed for each service and then modified to better suit automation needs. A single service may include participants from various departments. These roles and their activities and responsibilities are represented by exploiting the opportunities in a BPMN solution.

Intalio BPMS, with BPMN to model the processes underlying each service, enabled Bærum kommune to automate the components of each process that didn’t involve human intervention. Services where the entire process is driven by rules were fully automated, whereas the services that required human intervention were streamlined and optimized by automating components of the process.

“Inalio’s open-source solution allowed us to manage business processes easily within a Service Oriented Architecture. With the help of Intalio's technology, we delivered 24/7 online services to several thousands families reducing turnaround time from weeks to days, and these services can be easily adjusted to evolving requirements. We highly recommend Intalio for its reliable technology and unparalleled services offered to our organization”

—Oystein Aanrud, Advisor, ICT Operations, Bærum Kommune

A BPM centric SOA governance organization was developed, using Intalio to manage the complexity of an enterprise wide implementation of the technology. It was necessary to identify and assign functional ownership of the business services and processes as well as the underlying support services. All the integration between the processes and the end user UI application, just as the underlying services, was implemented using web services technology and routed via MuleSoft Enterprise Service Bus. XSLT transformation was used for complex data transformation invoked by the executable process. Web services offered an efficient technology to incorporate the process with other application services and also guaranteed proper integration with human workflow.

SFO-Registration System for After School Care Program powered by Intalio|BPMS

Control over the data involved in a process and process automation using standard practices offered several advantages to both the user and the municipality.

• Reduced response time. With an automated process, the processing time can be significantly reduced. For example, in a fully automated process a decision is provided to the user as soon as the form is submitted.
• Reduced workload. Even if few components of the process can be automated, the number of work hours required to make a decision is greatly reduced. Instead, the caseworkers can focus on the decisions that require human evaluation and avoid repetitive tasks
• Compliance. When the process is well documented, compliance with all the laws, rules and regulations becomes easier.
• Equal treatment. Using a standardized (partially) automated process for all services ensures equal treatment for all users.
• Easily adjusts to new requirements. By externalizing the business rules, processes can be easily adapted to the evolving requirements.
• Standardization. Intalio|BPMS allows all processes to be documented and implemented in compliance with existing standards.
• Auditing and documentation. Every process invocation is saved with all relevant data that enables routines for auditing and archiving.
• 24x7 availability.
• Eliminates the need for the customer to appear in person.

Solution Benefits

Simple, fast and effective

INTALIO|BPMS an open-source solution provided a fully integrated framework to design, deploy and execute business processes. Intalio offered the municipality a solution to get started immediately based on a low cost implementation. BPM standards, such as BPMN, BPEL, WSDL, and XSD, provided an intuitive and easy design, and the process was fully executed without any modifications to the code.

Due to the value achieved through automated processes, business teams are willing to actively participate in an early stage of the project to provide service assessment, define the specific services and processes, identify requirements and design overall process flows.

Process modeling and implementation is a step forward in bringing the business and IT closer together, thereby ensuring solutions are understood and accepted by the business teams. With an intuitive interface of Intalio|Designer, the BPM enables the business personnel to provide precise and detailed description for both services and processes effectively.

The use of Intalio|BPMS application is constantly expanded across the municipality’s services since its introduction in 2009. In 2011, Bærum Kommune signed a three-year contract with Intalio to secure further evolutions.