Venlo City

Successful Implementation of Digital Decision Making

Heidelberg (GER), November 2016 - The Venlo (Netherlands) city council is a modern, ambitious organization in full development and intent on improving its services to its residents. This development focuses on improving executive and civil management, operating more customer focused, working more integrally, and giving more space and responsibilities to its staff.

Additionally, solutions are formulated to the challenges of far-reaching digitalization, regionalization, decentralization, the continuous demands for efficiency and efficacy, and the demands of a new generation of employees and citizens.

The introduction of a new case system was necessary to comply with goals in relation to the speed in which residents’ questions can be processed. At every moment, it should be possible to view the progress of the process in which a case is being handled. Digital decision making is new for the organization. Through the case system, decisions are being presented to the management team and cabinet.

For guidance during the digital decision-making process, instructions were needed that could help users further directly during the process and at every desired moment. To achieve this, Venlo city council selected tt guide. After a short implementation of tt guide, Venlo city council was able to develop these instructions, called guides, themselves. They now guide the user step by step through the process in the system. These instructions are self-explanatory and self-directing so that the user should not be able to make any mistakes. The guides are offered in a context-sensitive format. This way the user will not need to search for instructions. Within seconds and a maximum of two mouse clicks, the right instructions are available.

Venlo city council is particularly pleased about the enthusiasm with which users have responded to this new way of support in the work place and the speed with which the instructions were developed. This substantially saves development time and time that users would otherwise need to be trained in the classroom. “Within Venlo city council, we have been very busy with the introduction of digital decision making. tt guide appears to be a great tool to familiarize users with this complete new way of working”, explains John van den Hout, Project Manager at Venlo city council. Additionally, there has been a noticeable reduction in questions at the support desk because users are more self-sufficient now that they use the guides whenever they are stuck.