Operational Management Entity Rijn en Braassem

Since 2018, operational management entity Rijn en Braassem has been the joint information service of the municipalities of Alphen aan den Rijn, and Kaag & Braassem. This joining of forces resulted in simplifying and streamlining their application landscape.

In order to achieve this goal quite a lot of work needed to be done and various, on-premises built integrations had to migrate to the cloud. Fortunately, operational management entity Rijn en Braassem had the help of Enable U in accomplishing this task.

Information-driven work, with an important focus on integration

Good IT people are scarce, and the inhouse skills are actually mainly needed to optimize internal processes. At Operational Management Entity Rijn en Braasem, this realization ensures that the current application landscape and the associated on-premises (local) integrations are examined.

Currently we do not really have an integration policy or Enterprise Architecture. About 50 applications that are being deployed, still contain mainly local integrations, which are built in-house. However, with the arrival of a CIO office, maturity has been introduced in the IT organization, and is now in a more strategic position. Being able to work in an information-driven manner, with an important focus on integration, is the biggest pillar of the CIO office.

Migration to the Cloud

Peter van Meerendonk: “We want 80% of our applications to run in the cloud by 2023. We are a hands-on organization that has traditionally been used to doing things ourself. But to be future-proof a new consideration of our tasks and responsibilities is necessary. By choosing an integration partner, we have been able to outsource an important part of our IT strategy with a knowledgeable and reliable partner.”

“Enable U is the largest player in the field of integration within the Dutch Municipality sector and when it comes to cloud migration processes, they have often dealt with these complex situations.”

“Since we are now in the middle of a migration process to our new cloud (SaaS) activity-based information system, this is very valuable to us. Existing connections will be transferred to the cloud. We also want to be able to integrate future applications, such as low-code tools, quickly and without problems. This makes our organisation flexible and future-proof”.

Not just two systems

Peter continues: “Like many organisations, we also have difficulty keeping the focus of IT staff on track. All the resources that we can save by obtaining specialist knowledge from outside are therefore a big bonus.”

“Integration is often thought of too easily; it’s not a matter of ‘these two systems need to talk’; integration is a close collaboration between users, security, data analysts, network management and architects. They do not always speak the same language but still have to come to a solution.”

“An integration team where different disciplines work together closely can solve this, if supervised by a professional and thorough partner. We have found this to be Enable U.”