KuntaIT (the Local Government IT Management Project) recently headed a customer service project in which the cities of Oulu, Kuusamo and Rovaniemi also participated. Together with KuntaIT and these cities, Ixonos now publishes for open use the main components of an e-government solution suitable as a municipal customer service solution. The source code being published allows municipalities, other public administration actors and their partners to take advantage of a predefined and reliably tested e-service model. The completed components are available to everyone, and their adopters will automatically benefit from continuous development.
Ixonos has developed the solution as part of the customer service project that KuntaIT headed and the cities of Oulu, Kuusamo and Rovaniemi participated in. Ixonos and its partner Sysart Oy together provide the cities with an e-government solution using the SaaS (software as a service) model.
“The code we publish this time offers increasingly concrete benefits relating e.g. to the population information system interface and to the logging components. These advantages are available to everyone interested. Municipalities and other public administration actors can tap into a predefined service solution that is known to work, and service providers can improve the speed and cost-effectiveness of their service development as well as release their services for the common benefit of all parties”, says Teppo Kuisma, head of Ixonos’ Business Solutions area.
In spring 2009, Ixonos and the city of Oulu published the source code of an e-government platform, including its content modules, for open use. Public administrations and service developers were offered free use of those groundbreaking e-government solutions. Ixonos has developed the software package of the Oulu citizens’ portal further, adding e-service elements and support components needed to implement process-based e-business and e-government services.
From a technical perspective, the customer service project is based on Sysart’s Requeste customer and feedback management system, on the basic components of the e-government solution that was previously developed for the city of Oulu and on the background services of that solution. The functionality of those services was now extended into various background systems, e.g. through the integration of population information system services. Ixonos distributes the main components through OSOR.eu, a web-based service maintained by the European Union.
“Our objective for the customer service project was to generate synergy between municipalities”, explains Matti Franck, head of KuntaIT. “We have an overall customer service solution model and concept, which the cities participating in the project will keep on developing further as a joint venture with Ixonos’ support. Other municipalities are also free to take advantage of the customer service solution and concept as well as of the open source code now being published”, Mr Franck continues.
“Ixonos is strongly committed to the development of open source and open architecture solutions. By freely sharing code, we keep aiming to promote the development of e-service quality as well as inter-municipality cooperation and service development”, concludes Mr Kuisma.
Ixonos offers interested parties support in the implementation and transition stages as well as in whole policy reform projects.
For more information, please contact:
Ixonos Plc, Teppo Kuisma, Head of Business Unit, tel. +358 50 581 4075, teppo.kuisma/at/ixonos.com
KuntaIT, Matti Franck, IT Director, tel. +358 44 907 5208, matti.franck/at/vm.fi
The open source code of the customer service project’s main components is available at OSOR.eu, a web-based service maintained by the European Union, at http://www.osor.eu/.
