About Municipality of Gotland
The Municipality of Gotland has around 7,000 employees providing a broad range of social and environmental services for the 57,000 inhabitants of Gotland, an island off the east coast of Sweden. The Municipality is responsible for the health, safety and education of Gotland's citizens, and also helps to nurture the island's two main industries: tourism and agriculture.
Challenge
When the Municipality of Gotland was created in 1971, the Municipality also took over the county council's responsibilities, including medical care and public transport. During the 1990s, the Municipality's IT was managed by three separate IT departments, making it difficult to undertake major strategic technology initiatives.
Working with a fragmented infrastructure that was outdated and had high administrative costs, the Municipality was struggling both to deliver effective service and to introduce new solutions. In particular, the organisation wanted to create portals for citizens and school pupils, and needed first to create a robust identity and access management environment.
More generally, the Municipality aimed to reduce the cost and increase the reliability of its IT infrastructure through a programme of standardisation. The goal was to create a set of centrally managed applications and services, running on a highly available platform, and make them available securely to internal and external users alike.
Novell Solution
The Municipality initiated a comprehensive renewal and streamlining project called MERIT (a Swedish acronym for citizen portal, streamlining and rationalisation by means of IT). This major new programme will be implemented in nine phases spanning more than two years.
"The existing IT infrastructure made it difficult to push ahead with our plans for MERIT, so the first step was to select a reliable basis for all the planned services," said Hans Lyttkens, IT Manager at the Municipality of Gotland. "We chose Novell Open Enterprise Server as our strategic network operating system based on its excellent availability, security and flexibility."
The programme will initially cover workstation standardisation and application virtualisation, migration planning, and the development of a coordinated IT platform and shared resource network for approximately 17,000 users. The Municipality will also create a single metadirectory for all users, whether internal or external, linked to a citizens' portal, and will develop the concept of the PC as a service, including application consolidation and central licence management.
"We based our decision for the Novell solution partly on impressive references from other municipalities," said Lyttkens. "Novell Identity Manager will enable us to create a single, consistent store of user data and use it to drive secure authentication services for all the applications we manage. By creating a single point of control for identity and security management and enabling the automation of numerous functions, the Novell solution will save considerable time and effort for IT administrators."
The Municipality selected Novell Identity Manager to provide a centralised identity and security management solution, and is now using the software to create a single metadirectory of user information. When complete, the metadirectory will link and synchronise a number of previously incompatible directory systems, ensuring consistent and accurate identity information across all systems and applications, and enabling the Municipality to simplify the administration of access rights.
"Novell's early support for Xen virtualisation will help us make better use of our hardware, enabling us to concentrate more logical systems on each server," said Schanz. "Not only will we reduce direct hardware costs, but we will also remove significant maintenance and licensing costs."
The Municipality will use Novell ZENworks® Configuration Management with Patch Management Services to automate software setup and update management for desktop systems, saving time and effort for IT staff and improving the user experience. The organisation also plans to implement ZENworks Endpoint Security Management to create, distribute and enforce security policies on user devices.
Results
With a centralised, rationalised identity and security management solution running on Novell Open Enterprise Server, the Municipality will significantly improve the levels of service it can offer to users while simultaneously reducing costs. The stability and availability of Novell Open Enterprise Server will ensure fewer interruptions to work even as the number of users grows.
"Our aim is to facilitate work for our employees and, at the same time, give the taxpayer the greatest possible return on his taxes," said Lyttkens. "Using Novell ZENworks Asset Management, we will be able to ensure that we are always paying for exactly the right number of software licences."
By creating a shared resource network, the Municipality will be able to deliver services securely to employees, pupils and citizens. Novell Identity Manager will determine access rights according to the profile of each user, enabling external users to access services without compromising security.
The Municipality currently has approximately 1,000 applications, and expects to be able to halve this number through standardisation and consolidation. The Municipality will use Novell ZENworks Asset Management to identify and remove unused software licences.