26/09/2022
 

With Open Source against the pandamic

THE CITY OF CHEMNITZ RELIES ON KIX

The future belongs to open source. This is not only the view of the federal government, which recently increased the budget for the promotion of digital sovereignty. The city of Chemnitz also converted its IT system - even before the plans of the traffic light coalition were known. A decision that paid off especially during the height of the Corona pandemic.

Around 4,000 people work for the city of Chemnitz at 1,000 locations, from the administrative and civic centre to the school secretariat and the craftsmen's yard. Concerns, applications and notices from the employees in the form of more than 20,000 tickets per year are processed by the staff for the approximately 3,600 computer workstations.

A huge administrative apparatus, in other words, to keep the third largest city in Saxony running. In order to optimise the internal processes as well as the interaction with the citizens, the IT of the city of Chemnitz decided to use the IT service management system KIX Pro.

As part of the implementation of its Digital Agenda, the city of Chemnitz has been gradually modernising all appropriate services and administrative processes internally and externally in a strategic project since 2021. The implementation of a KIX-based solution for IT service management represents one of a total of six strategic programme priorities within the Digital Agenda. 

Digital sovereignty and scalability are important factors

KIX Pro has now been in use in the city of Chemnitz since August 2020. Various selection criteria played a role in the decision, reports IT architect Daniel Grobe, who will continue to coordinate the city's IT service management in the coming years:

"It was clear to us from the beginning that the new system should be based on open source. An open source code not only stands for security, but also for transparency and digital sovereignty.

The exchange between developers and community ensures knowledge sharing, and sources of errors can be fixed very quickly - the large KIX community is optimal for this.

The price model that cape IT offers is really fair. If necessary, we can make adjustments and extensions without significantly driving up costs."

Citizens and employees benefit

Since its introduction, KIX has been used by all employees of the administration for IT fault reports and service orders, without the need for lengthy training in its use and handling. Thanks to the ticket system and with the help of defined workflows, the IT specialists can quickly process all orders. They also use KIX to manage all IT equipment such as computers, telephones, software, technology and resources.

There are numerous advantages for the authority. KIX helps IT to record, distribute and process internal requests or disruptions from the departments. All those involved have all the information at their disposal, which means they can find out about the current status of a process at any time.

The citizens of Chemnitz also benefit from the new system. With KIX, certain concerns of the citizens are recorded and processed as tickets. The processing status can be viewed transparently and up to date at any time. Communication is automated, which relieves the city staff. In this way, the processing time of citizens' concerns could be significantly reduced.

This was also noticeable during the peak phases of the pandemic. At the beginning of Corona and before the introduction of KIX, the city's pandemic hotline was often overloaded - citizens were stuck on hold and could not get through to the processors. This in turn led to a long backlog of concerns and a high internal communication effort.

Massive relief during the Corona pandemic thanks to the ticket system

In the fight against the pandemic, the City of Chemnitz also relied on the KIX software product known from the IT department. Here, too, all concerns, whether by telephone or by e-mail, are recorded as tickets. The employees are no longer dependent on processing in Excel; communication takes place directly on the ticket. The distribution of tasks between the different teams has thus become much easier.

Also, the figures no longer have to be collected manually in a statistic, the recording is done automatically. Thanks to its digitalisation strategy, in which the use of open source technologies is an important building block, the city of Chemnitz is also well positioned for future challenges and crises.

Daniel Grobe is very satisfied with the functions of KIX and the cooperation with cape IT. He and his team would also like to rely on it in the future:

"I would recommend KIX at any time. It runs stably, has a user-friendly interface, is easy to expand and cape IT's support is always excellent. We are already considering expanding the use of KIX to other areas and migrating to KIX Pro everywhere." 

In the future, KIX could then also be used in personnel services, procurement, fleet management and janitorial services.

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