Satisfied customer since 2003 The Federal City of Bonn has put its IT processes on a new technical footing.
The noble goal of this commitment: more efficient management of the approximately 3,000 user accounts, greater data security and, last but not least, lower operating costs.

“It was a complete mess,” Franz Josef Skoda, responsible for the Personnel and Organization Office in the central administration of the Federal City of Bonn, quickly gets to the point.
The reason: the creation, modification and deletion of almost 3000 user accounts by the 50 departmental administrators in the various offices of the federal city was causing problems.
In addition, maintaining the information within Bonn’s central administration was also difficult.
Without standardized processes, requests were made arbitrarily, data was incompletely entered into the system or missing approvals were overlooked.
“It was no wonder that change requests were delayed,” Skoda continues.
Skoda specifies the task at the time: “All user and computer changes had to be requested decentrally from one of the departmental administrators – who is responsible for IT in the sports office, the residents’ registration office, the foreigners’ office or the press office, for example.
This could be done either verbally by telephone or in writing.
There was no dedicated process or form for this step.
In addition, the request was forwarded to the head office, where it was processed by different people who were responsible for different areas – for example, setting up new email accounts, access to a file server or authorization to use an application.
This resulted in delays of one to two days on average before an order could be executed.
In addition, all change requests had to be manually transferred to the target systems.
Inconsistent data and media disruptions were the result.
Maintaining the user database was correspondingly difficult.
All of the 3000 user accounts had to be regularly checked for errors by hand.
This revealed outdated data, orphaned or duplicate accounts.
The problem: there was a lack of transparent processes.
In addition, there were no checks on the user rights assigned.
There was also no proof of the changes made.
Modifications could not be traced and the lack of documentation called compliance with guidelines into question.

The Bonn IT strategists envisioned a provisioning solution to solve the problems.
This should make it possible for the creation, modification and deletion of users and computer objects as well as their attributes to be automatically transferred to various target systems.
Administrators should thus be able to process orders more quickly and avoid having to maintain data twice.
“As a first step, we tried to develop our own tool to optimize IT service management. After some time, however, it became clear that programming our own tool would not meet all requirements and could not be integrated into the existing infrastructure,” says Skoda.
The city of Cologne also had similar problems with its IT management and together they set out to find a solution.
The aim was to reduce operating costs, increase data and system security and avoid data redundancy.

It was high time for Skoda and his team to launch a Europe-wide tender: At the beginning of 2003, various offers were obtained from small providers and specialists through to large IT companies.
Two providers were shortlisted: together with the City of Cologne, Bonn finally commissioned Munich-based econet AG to set up an automated change service in an environment of 3,000 Bonn and 8,000 Cologne users.
With econet’s cMatrix, changes can be initiated via standardized web interfaces and automatically implemented in the target systems.
The centralization of order creation with the completely service-oriented Architecture (SOA) technology-based cMatrix solution significantly relieves the burden on IT administration today: instead of each departmental administrator having to initiate their own methodology to deal with a request, they can access a central system in which processes and workflows are predefined.
In addition, the creation, modification and deletion of user and computer objects is standardized and their attributes are automatically transferred to various target systems.
In this way, administrators can process orders more quickly and at the same time avoid maintaining data twice.

“Gradual improvements would not have made much difference. With the econet solution and its authority-specific best practice approach based on the life cycle principle, the performance, service quality and cost structure of our IT operations have improved sustainably. And we have also achieved very good marks for compliance.” Franz Josef Skoda Head Office Administration Federal City of Bonn

Project manager Skoda explains the application using an example: As soon as a new employee is hired at the Federal City of Bonn, a department administrator enters all relevant data for the new user via an easy-to-use interface.
Directories are created automatically, the corresponding rights are defined and the required file storage and applications are activated.
If an employee leaves the authority or changes position, all it takes is a single change in the IT service management solution and access to business-critical applications and data is automatically blocked.
The transparent structures ensure that once authorizations have been assigned, they are no longer overlooked and that all employee authorizations are controlled and documented from the moment they join the Bonn city administration until they leave.
The Bonn project differs from Cologne not only in the lower number of users, different object properties in the user database and the external appearance of the user interface, but also in the different characteristics of the target systems.
In contrast to Cologne, reporting in Bonn is also generated from the IT service management solution.
This allows various reports to be generated for billing or audit purposes, showing which users belong to which group or which resources are located in an organizational unit.
For Bonn, it is important to obtain information about the use of resources: “We want systematic recording, evaluation and billing of performance data as well as seamless monitoring of resources. Transparency about the actual IT costs is the only way to save money in the medium term,” explains Franz Josef Skoda.
“Up to now, total costs have hardly been recorded and allocated – hopefully this will change soon with cMatrix. ”

The results are obvious: whereas in the past it took up to two days to process a change request, today it takes just five minutes.
Skoda’s conclusion: “Employees used to have to speak to up to four administrators to have changes made. Today, everything is much quicker: a single administrator can change authorizations and rights with just a few mouse clicks. We can now replicate all rights and filing structures across the entire city administration within 30 minutes. The long wait for missing access has finally come to an end.” Thanks to the automation and time savings, Bonn’s resources can now be used more effectively and much more efficiently.
Thanks to the newly gained capacities, the administrators can now continuously work on optimizing the underlying IT infrastructure and thus deliver considerable added value to the city administration.
The provisioning solution is also proving to be a successful solution for security and transparency: the audit-proof logging of processes enables a complete overview of who changed what and when at all times.
The fact that the processes mapped in cMatrix can be changed or expanded quickly and easily thanks to the flexible architecture and that higher data quality is guaranteed by the central data management are further advantages.
Skoda’s comments on the result are correspondingly euphoric: “We are very impressed by the IT service management solution and the users have also accepted the solution very positively – we could no longer do our work without cMatrix. The solution has met all our requirements and does more than we expected: We can automate entire processes and not just create or delete users.” Looking back, Skoda believes that Bonn could have saved itself the effort of developing its own solution: “In econet, we have found a great partner who offers us an optimal price/performance ratio.”