Intelligent IT Administration in Roskilde Municipality

In just three months, the municipality has implemented a configuration management database and service desk solution from Efecte which makes its IT infrastructure completely transparent and considerably lightens the task of support.

“I knew that a handful of large Danish state enterprises were struggling to get CMDB solutions to work, but that it was costing them blood, sweat and tears and a whole lot of money. And when I asked one of the country’s biggest IT suppliers if they could help, they offered to fl y me to Belgium to show me how a CMDB solution functioned in practice. There were simply no Danish customers that had been able to get it to work,” remembers Ole Bech, Roskilde Municipality’s head of IT. “So when Efecte claimed that they could implement a dynamic CMDB solution in less than three months, quite honestly I just didn’t believe them.”

Error-free Operation And Impressive Clarity

However, Efecte’s subsequent demonstration – in Ole Bech’s words – was more than convincing, and the company’s long list of Nordic customers spoke for itself. So after a brief period of consideration, the municipality chose to sign a contract with the Finnish company, which had opened an offi ce in Denmark in the same year, and today markets its solutions under the common name “ERP for IT”.

“We began implementing the Efecte system in September 2007, and it actually was fi nished three months later, with no external help other than the specialist that Efecte placed at our disposal. The system has had a completely error-free record ever since, and is decidedly impressive,” says Ole.

He is not only favourably impressed with the system’s implementation and operating reliability, but also with the clarity he and his colleagues have received. Now, the municipality’s IT staff can retrieve updated data on everything from enquiries from individual users to the number of hardware units and details of which software is being run at which location.

“If I want to create an analysis of the number of support minutes we have spent on a particular server or printer, I can do that. And the Efecte solution also provides Efecte Corp. an incredibly detailed picture of the relations between users, hardware and network resources. If a PC goes down, we can see what programs have been run on it over the last 24 hours, and which precise networks it has drawn upon. That means we can provide far more effi cient support than ever before,” Ole continues.

Control of all Licences And Supplier Agreements

The next step is to automate control of all licence and IT-related supplier agreements via the Efecte Contract module.

“The system warns us in good time if a contract or a period of notice is due to expire – which is something we used to spend a ridiculous amount of time keeping track of before,” says Ole.

The system is also capable of automatically monitoring whether the municipality has too few – or too many – applications in operation in relation to the licensing agreements it has acquired.

“But it can also keep track of whether the installed software is actually being used. There is for example no reason to renew the licence of an expensive program that a staff member installed and last used on a single project a year ago,” says Ole.

Another major advantage of the Efecte solution is that it is practically maintenance-free, as well as easy to adapt and scale to changing needs.

“With the old system it took so long to retrieve anything other than the most banal standard reports that we never got it done. With the Efecte solution, on the other hand, we can retrieve reports ourselves, and build in extra views towards the database on everything from general relationships to the most detailed subjects. This has made a very big difference in our daily routine,” says Ole.