Eclipse and iMEDIC Help the City of Stuttgart Streamline ...

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Handling the IT needs of an enterprise is a challenge in itself. Adding in the com-

plexities an entire city’s IT hard-ware and software approval process can be an even more complicated process. To simplify its IT purchas-ing system, the City of Stuttgart, Germany—with the aid software provider iMEDIC in Esslingen, Germany and Eclipse—chose toput their trust in open source so-lutions to fulfi ll the needs of its organization.

The City of Stuttgart has about 600,000 inhabitants. 12,000 peo-ple are working within the city’s administration, of which 6,000 are using computer workstations. Within Stuttgart’s IT infrastructure, all of these computer users submit purchasing requests to 17 managers who are responsible for providing hardware, software, and consulting.

Before considering iMEDIC’s Open IT solution, which is based on Eclipse RCP, JBoss, and Post-greSQL, Stuttgart’s IT department was using a paper-based system to process requests and track pur-chase orders. However, with an IT budget of $6 million, the City decided to replace this system with an electronic document system. That’s when they were introduced to iMEDIC’s Open IT. Open IT is

a workfl ow solution that supports decision making processes in public administration by breaking tasks into logical steps. The idea behind Open IT is to optimize the adminis-trative process by enhancing trans-parency and reducing the number of paper-based records needed by replacing them with electronic documents.

“Open IT allows us to speed the decision-making process for hard-ware, software and support,” says Mr. Walter Pfeifer one of the City of Stuttgart’s IT project leaders. “If someone in our organization needs something, they call one of our ad-ministrators. These administrators use Open IT to select the product or support issue from a database. Once the selection is made and discussed by the managers, it proceeds into an electronic workfl ow. The Eclipse RCP makes the entire process intuitive and the application easy to

use. In the past, requests took three to four weeks to work their way through the organization. Now, the process takes two to three days.”

iMEDIC used Eclipse RCP to develop a user-centric GUI that provided the City of Stuttgart with individual perspectives on each document and decision. “Our customers in the City of Stuttgart tell us that their experience with the RCP-based interface gave them the immediate impression that they were working with a profes-sional product,” says Joern Weigle, iMEDIC’s CFO and project leader for Open X. “It offers extremely reliable, stable, and fast response times.” They also found the con-text-sensitive help to be useful and the integrated tab technology gave those familiar with Lotus NOTES a familiar means of navigating the application.”

iMEDIC used Eclipse RCP to provide specialized views and customizable perspectives for dif-ferent user groups, individual fi lters and sorting for users, and storing (on shutdown) and retrieving (on startup) the client-status. Open IT uses Eclipse RCP to provide a user-permission based GUI that gives individuals a clear view into each document and decision. In addition,

Eclipse and iMEDIC Help the City of Stuttgart Streamline IT Activities

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it provides for certified electronic signatures, ensuring that decisions can be tracked to their source. Ac-cording to Weigle, Eclipse RCP’s extensible and update environ-ment was also a plus; it allowed for iMEDIC and the City of Stuttgart to quickly push out fixes and new ver-sions of the OpenIT system trans-parently to the end user.

“The idea behind Open IT is to help decision makers in public adminis-tration,” Weigle says. “Regardless of an application’s capabilities, it’s useless without an intuitive means of navigating the toolset. Eclipse RCP helped us to develop an en-terprise-class front end that made our custom application look like a shrink-wrapped product. It helped us to provide the functionality the City of Stuttgart needed to reduce their workload without incurring a lengthy learning curve inherent in many systems.”

It was also necessary for Open IT to conform to federal standards for government applications in working with the City of Stuttgart. These standards provide recom-mendations for the development of new IT systems within the public sector and describe in detail the compliant three-tier architecture. It specifies the types of databases, middleware, and front ends that can be used. “Basically, the standards focus on web applications but they also make a lot of recommendations with regards to rich clients,” Weigle says. “Our architecture is based on J2EE, and an open source database like PostgreSQL makes it very easy to use RCP as a front end and still be in line with the standard.”

The next step in the relationship between iMEDIC and the City of Stuttgart, is to develop reporting and analysis tools. Here, iMEDIC is evaluating the Eclipse BIRT (Busi-

ness Intelligence and Reporting Tools) system to give more trans-parency to the executives in the city and to allow the controllers and potential investigators to analyze data regarding procurement practic-es and history. BIRT provides core reporting features such as report layout, data access, and scripting.

Pfeifer is pleased with many aspects of Open IT and looks forward to making further use of open source solutions in the future. “The cost-to-benefit relationship of Open IT is impressive and the system is very stable,” he says. “We want to use open source for administra-tion processes in other departments throughout our town. We haven’t had any problems in the time we’ve used it, and we’ve created many new systems that allow us to perform our IT duties more efficiently.”

An overview of the decisions, content, and strucure of a proposal in Open IT.