SED; One Source, One Truth

SED Organisation – SED for short, is the official work organisation of the municipalities of Stede Broec, Enkhuizen and Drechterland. The work processes and services are the same as much as possible in the three municipalities, but SED does take into account specific wishes and policy freedom. Especially in the field of Information Technology (ICT), this creates challenges, but it also provides great solutions.

Like all other municipalities in the Netherlands, SED also has to deal with challenges; existing ICT solutions of the three municipalities, changing laws and regulations, the pressure of increased numbers of WOO requests, housing, nature and the environment and the list is getting longer and longer. Only automation can offer a solution there, and the current ICT team has taken up that challenge.

Future challenges

Silva Visser, Head of the Information Department, is very adamant; Together with Gertjan Gerritsen (Information Architect), who made the first contacts with Enable U, she and the other colleagues are working on a better understanding of the architecture. This is the only way to meet all the challenges of the future. CommonGround, and especially the idea of “one source, one truth” ensure that organizations like SED can continue to work efficiently and meet all future challenges.

“Precisely because so much data is stored in different places, answering citizens’ questions is very complex,” says Silva Visser.While the CommonGround idea of course mainly applies to national facilities, we also need to implement a kind of local CommonGround. We need to work on an architecture that gives us insight into how the processes run and where we can quickly understand what connections are needed and also create them quickly. Because only if it is easier to link applications can we deliver the solutions that the municipalities need faster.”

Links between different applications and national facilities

Part of the solution, of course, is standardizing applications and using more cloud services. For the other part, the links between the various applications and national facilities, it was decided to work together with Enable U. To get the latter accepted by the 3 municipalities, a special approach was chosen. The exchange of Basic Data was not set up efficiently. SED employees, together with Enable U and Shared Services Center DeSom, have quietly made the preparations and on June 7, the Managed Integration went live, with which all 3 municipalities now use the same cloud service from Enable U. The users were informed about the change after a month. The calm after the storm was an experience useful for upcoming integrations.

Niels Beckers, CCO of Enable U; “Gertjan and Silva of SED organization have a clear vision of where they want to go. Implementing CommonGround, retrieving data at the source and working in a data-driven way. The SED Organization chose 2Distribute and because this had a major impact on many existing applications and processes, this was not an easy project. All applications and their interactions were mapped, huge amounts of data had to be loaded (and kept up-to-date) and all kinds of subscriptions implemented in the old solution had to continue to work. And all this while the 3 different municipalities continued to provide their normal services. We are proud that they have trusted Enable-U to make all this happen, with 2Distribute as a cloud service.“

“Puzzling with the ICT landscape is not so much a matter of getting the pieces of the puzzle to fit. The main challenge is to cut out the right pieces.” (Gertjan Gerritsen, Information Architect).