Paradigm supports the Municipality of Jette in its automation process

Indeed, there's no doubt that for Municipalities and Public Centres for Social Welfare (PCSW) managing numerous flows of information and processes on a day-to-day basis, automation offers a number of advantages: ecological challenges, operational efficiency and improved service to citizens, without losing sight of the issue of the digital divide. 

A successful collaboration 

The collaboration began with a number of forms developed on IRISbox, and continued with a link to SharePoint for information retrieval.

"The first time I saw the forms from IRISbox arriving directly in SharePoint just a few minutes later, without any manual (re-)encoding, I felt a surge of adrenalin... In my mind, it happened very quickly: I saw all the potential it could bring us, and the consequences of collaborating with other municipal services and Paradigm colleagues," explains Sam Buysschaert, Director Strategic Information Management at the Municipality of Jette.

This is why the Municipality of Jette made the decision to transfer to Paradigm the environment that had already been developed in order to collaborate with Team Office 365.

Another significant success achieved by our teams is the link that has been enabled between SharePoint and BOS for everything relating to College or Board decisions. There are several advantages: "We used to walk around with papers under our arms. They were put in a pile and had to wait for the rest of the papers to arrive. All these problems are now solved: the entire file is now in SharePoint, and everyone involved in the process can access it at any time. In Jette, many processes/requests have to be approved by the College or Council, or even the Mayor. Thanks to our collaboration with Paradigm, we've been able to facilitate these flows. The agents who process the requests no longer have to re-encode everything manually, since the information arrives directly in a template. BOS then retrieves this template, filled in with the required information, and creates a College/Council decision, etc. SharePoint has enabled us to automate the process, from the creation of a request by a citizen right through to the final processing of their file," says Sam Buysschaert.

What made this project a success? Trust and human contact! "You have a partner in front of you whom you trust; there's mutual respect, and that's very important for working together. Paradigm, a regional institution, acted as a full partner, not telling us what to do, but supporting us and helping us to put our proposals, ideas and needs into practice. Together, we're building the foundations of a whole new organisation, which will open up possibilities 20, 30, 50 years from now.  It makes you want to find other projects and go further together," points out Sam Buysschaert before concluding, "It's something we couldn't have done on our own. Fortunately, we were able to work together with our colleagues at Paradigm. I think they're the right partner."

The next steps 

Several agreements have been concluded between the Municipality of Jette and Paradigm to reflect on processes to be automated, as is the case for the flow of subsidies and the flow of grants, which are currently in production. The aim? To automate as many processes as possible in the future.

There is also the question of electronic signatures, which remains a crucial challenge, not least for archiving. It's an issue that Paradigm and the Municipality of Jette are still working on, and eSign could be a possible solution.

As you can see, there are many and varied opportunities for progression and future projects in collaboration with the Municipality of Jette. We'll be sure to keep you informed of the next major steps !